That's interesting - I found that same fusion super-jarring, to the point that a part of me actually started feeling embarrassed for the author. Even though I know it's a satire, and done in that way purposefully - it was visceral, I just couldn't help it.
“Oh. You are still here and obviously don’t agree.”
/listens to a hint of an argument
“Fine. Prove me wrong. You’d like to use a sophisticated data model to prove your dateability? By all means.”
—-
“And that friends, is how the Data Science disciple came to be. It naturally evolved from this simple state of social study to include other quality of life enhancing topics like optimizing ad delivery networks, SharePoint page utilization estimates, and developing ML prompts for generative adult genre fiction.”
(Hugs to my brilliantly nerdy data science friends)
> "An average blue whale weighs two hundred thousand pounds. How much do you think I weigh?"
Would that actually work on someone in that situation in real life though? I know the author is going for "anchoring" from Kahneman 1974, but the incentive to not insult someone you want to be cooperative in the future in that scenario is so strong, and the person would probably think longer to avoid an infoleak.
Amusing bit also alienating to those from other subcultures and I do think the memes we have to share are important enough that we shouldn't be putting people off.
I've gone back and forth on this a bit. Currently I don't think they're that important. I've seen quite a lot of good thinking get done without those concepts. Rationality certainly has the potential to be enjoyable to some people, but I think of it now as more of an optional side quest than some sort of gospel that needs to be spread to everyone.
I've spent years with a child and wife in love with the Harry Potter books, I read them (in Spanish, to improve my understanding; very rational), I've seen the movies, and I must say: the start is certainly good.
I mean, sure. I like Harry Potter and I also liked HPMOR. Although imo it goes off the rails in the second half or so and kinda fails to live up to its promise.
Satire / parody doesn't necessarily have to be a merciless polemic against the target - and as a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to read HPMOR and not come away with the feeling that the author was a pretty big Harry Potter fan.
Another thing that comes to mind is the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, which sends up lots of horror tropes but is still fun and enjoyable for fans of the genre.
I understood, I was just using one less level of meta parody to make my point. I thought TFA was funny, if not hilarious. I also enjoyed HPMOR. So I'll make my point again, which is that you can like a thing and also like its parody.
I thought about that, but I don't think it's actually that similar. HPMOR is at least supposed to be educational (though I think that's somewhat dubious [0]). This is basically an in-joke for people who read Thinking Fast and Slow or similar. The character should have talked to someone who was in the military about the importance of high-quality footwear.
[0]: Though carrying 4 combat application tourniquets in your clothing at all times is probably a good idea. The part about time pressure and disregarding time-wasting social activities in emergency situations is also reasonable[1], but the characters should have come up with contingency plans and gone over checklists and emergency conditions with the authority figures beforehand to prevent them getting in the way.
[1]: i.e. if you got stabbed and are bleeding out, don't tell someone "it's fine" (it's not fine at all) and let them go first because it's "polite".
It's been years since I read it. How does it hype up cryogenic preservation? I don't recall it being a major theme and it doesn't seem to fit into the HP context.
You are right that it doesn't fit in. You are wrong that it isn't a major theme. Probably the last third of the book is about cryogenically preserving someone while looking for a way to revive them.
See comment below regarding dementors. When I read those passages it suddenly clicked for me what the whole thing was about. Easy to miss though, it's not as if they are advertising it.
This is a story where our hero is the heir to an ancient tradition of seeking immortality, where the most vile creatures in the universe are afraid of him because he thinks death sucks, and who spends the entire ending trying to heal a cryogenically frozen person and bring immortality to the masses.
It's not "easy to miss". The author beats you 'bout the head with his ideology. It's heavy-handed even for something explicitly didactic.
"A True Patronus can destroy them, because it is fueled by the thought that Death does exist and that we must face it, but that we will one day defeat it."
I liked this story and think HPMoR is the worst thing I've ever read in its entirety.
The first few chapters of HPMoR are fine, I suppose. It's pretty lighthearted. But it rapidly devolves into unhinged ranting at extreme length. The last five hundred thousand pages are a vehicle for the "wisdom" of one of the most insufferable, unjustifiably arrogant, and misinformed people to ever draw breath.
Just go read Elon Musk's Twitter feed. Same experience, whole lot shorter.
If you had allocated one second to rational thought you would have realised you are not the intended audience because you don’t understand it and thus won’t find it funny.
Before reacting to what might seem like flame bait, I tried to stay in style to the article and would like to point out that the ‘gag worthiness’ is intended and part of the joke.
There's a fine line between being a parody of a style and just being bad. I'm not certain where this one falls, but it's not really working for me either.
Perhaps a subset of HN is just excited to take the "rationalist" movement down a peg, which I suppose is a positive development.
I'm not convinced it's positive, though I definitely understand the impulse. (And specifically wanting to take down LessWrong, which has turned very weird and navel gaze-y).
But it's a lot like the vitriol I see towards effective altruism. There's a good idea there (i.e. wanting to train oneself to think rationally, or wanting to do charity in a way that achieves the most good for the amount of money given). It's a bit sad to me that because the representatives of these ideas are flawed (rationality, LessWrong, Eliezer), or because they've been used as cover for shitty behavior (effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried) that the consensus becomes "there's nothing good here and it's all bullshit".
This pattern of throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems absolutely pervasive in modern discourse, you can see variations of it in people's thinking on vaccines, racism, democracy, journalism, freedom of speech, and global warming, to think of just a few examples.
Sorry, this became kind of a rant, but I really wish our internet discourse could do a better job of filtering babies from bathwater than it currently does.
I think rationalism as an idea is pretty good, and I found the article funny. It's mostly a parody of a type of rationalism that does not exist though, i.e. idealized economic agents, not the type of rationalism that people actually want, where you achieve whatever your existing goals are and minimize the chance of catastrophic error/failure.
> If we model individuals in a shared sociocultural milieu as adapting to similar selection pressures, many stable strategies incorporate altruistic cooperation
I have always formulated this for myself as follows: Any sufficiently strategic self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
I have come to that conclusion myself over the years too.
But "bad people" or aholes also have usefulness. You sometimes need people to challenge things that only an unreasonable person would challenge. And you need the occasional Steve Jobs too.
But unlike altruistic people, we generally don't give the aholes as much credit. So, ironically, perhaps altruism is the better self serving strategy.
You can't have too many altruistic people. You can however have too many assholes and the number of assholes where this effect starts to dominate is not all that high. The fact that our societies reward asshole behavior as much as they do is a huge problem.
Not sure that's true. You're assuming altruism has no failure modes or pathologies. I know plenty of people whose altruism is driven by various anxieties and neuroses, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation, at the very least. A whole society of altruists could easily be very fragile and thus vulnerable to the slightest defector or adversary (cf. Galaxy Quest).
Some degree of assholes and psychopaths make for robust systems that protect against abuse, intentional or accidental.
Interesting viewpoint. I'm sure some assholes and psychopaths would love to have a figleaf to explain their behavior. But in my experience: you can have 90% nice people and 10% assholes and it will wreck your life. Even 1:30 is probably still too many.
And the failure modes and pathologies you describe are external: an exploiter is by definition not part of the group of altruists and that makes them a perfect example of how few assholes it takes to ruin things.
Suggesting we benefit from and should tolerate some degree of assholes is not some kind of justification for asshole behaviour. It's a similar effect where we wouldn't care about computer security if criminals and black hats didn't exist, which would leave us incredibly vulnerable. This doesn't entail that we should proactively hire or encourage criminals and black hats to attack us.
The fact that the problems I pointed out are external is because those were just the most obvious failure modes, do not take it as an exhaustive list.
In other words, societies that consist only of members who are highly strategic in their self-interest (i.e. altruistic) may be overly stable and lack the sort of disruptions or "mutations" that short-term thinkers introduce. Such societies are likely to stagnate. Consider, as very rough approximations, twentieth century America vs. ancient China.
While acknowledging the social utility of disruption, I see no reason to conclude that altruism is either incompatible or inversely correlated with the ability to disrupt.
Interestingly enough, it's the a-holes that seem to be getting the most credit and rewards in recent years. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all the populist elected heads of state, etc. The kind people seem to be the losers in recent history. Wish it were the opposite.
Ah, I misread. I doubt there was such an extent of political and corporate corruption or anything analogous. Maybe that isn't fair for me to say as I'm a product of recent history.
>I have always formulated this for myself as follows: Any sufficiently strategic self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.
This "sufficiently strategic self-interest" is the same kind of non-existing unicorn as the "sufficiently smart compiler".
>Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
Evolution (if we abstract it as a thing with intentions) is satisfied with the survival of the species. If the individual perishes, it's fine as long as they either protected their offspring or helped the others in their species survive, there will be more of them (because this actions help the species survive more and make more copies of itself, so species with members who will sacrifices themselves for the species get an advantage). Individual ants and bees for example will sacrifice themselves for the collective.
So, empathy that drives altruistic acts is not the same as "strategic self-interest". If we are to see it in a reductionary way, let's do it properly: usually it's the interest of the species (or the offspring) driving it.
> So, empathy that drives altruistic acts is not the same as "strategic self-interest". If we are to see it in a reductionary way, let's do it properly: usually it's the interest of the species (or the offspring) driving it.
I'm sorry for that bug in the system, sir; we were short of time while designing this whole shebang. The happiness of the individual and a bunch of other things were not really a goal but, as you have cleverly noted, a biochemical feedback to get them to play. But now you have outgrown natural evolution--our sloppy design strategy--and you can fix this bug on your own. Off the top of my head, you could add a magic mushroom that makes people immortal and infertile. But surely you can come up with something better. Now back to enjoying my retirement. God.
As a TOTREP, Victoria would have know that people think at the margin and so she would never have asked whats-her-face for her shoes at that moment. The writer fell into a classic trap of creating a contrived situation just to get the main to meet her love interest. Good effort overall, but reads like a first draft.
Review: For those who found themselves too intellectual to enjoy the teen romance magic school vampire genre perfectly embodied by the fanfic My Immortal (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/1/My-Immortal), Superrational presents a more sophisticated rationalist re-imagining of the magic school universe. May it make the great Yudkowsky proud.
Reminds me of William Gibson's short story, The Gernsback Continuum.
> "...Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."
Online games often have various particle effects that fire off when using an ability, which alone is a nice way to clearly and quickly indicate that something has occurred. However, what often ends up happening is when you get multiple people firing off dozens of these effects non-stop, you end up with an incomprehensible rainbow puke filling the screen.
This beautiful story has made me realize the same thing happens when using "intellectual" jargon.
94 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] thread/hears none
/looks up
“Oh. You are still here and obviously don’t agree.”
/listens to a hint of an argument
“Fine. Prove me wrong. You’d like to use a sophisticated data model to prove your dateability? By all means.”
—- “And that friends, is how the Data Science disciple came to be. It naturally evolved from this simple state of social study to include other quality of life enhancing topics like optimizing ad delivery networks, SharePoint page utilization estimates, and developing ML prompts for generative adult genre fiction.”
(Hugs to my brilliantly nerdy data science friends)
Would that actually work on someone in that situation in real life though? I know the author is going for "anchoring" from Kahneman 1974, but the incentive to not insult someone you want to be cooperative in the future in that scenario is so strong, and the person would probably think longer to avoid an infoleak.
Marvelous.
[1]: https://skunkledger.substack.com/p/my-opening-speech-at-the-...
I've found the techniques and concepts most useful at work, where they've been amazingly helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5dTcc1eS4w
Great line. Modelo is the most popular beer in America, but I doubt most people would realize that. It’s like… a Normie inside joke. Is that possible?
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyK...
https://hpmor.com/
Satire / parody doesn't necessarily have to be a merciless polemic against the target - and as a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to read HPMOR and not come away with the feeling that the author was a pretty big Harry Potter fan.
Another thing that comes to mind is the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, which sends up lots of horror tropes but is still fun and enjoyable for fans of the genre.
[0]: Though carrying 4 combat application tourniquets in your clothing at all times is probably a good idea. The part about time pressure and disregarding time-wasting social activities in emergency situations is also reasonable[1], but the characters should have come up with contingency plans and gone over checklists and emergency conditions with the authority figures beforehand to prevent them getting in the way.
[1]: i.e. if you got stabbed and are bleeding out, don't tell someone "it's fine" (it's not fine at all) and let them go first because it's "polite".
It's not "easy to miss". The author beats you 'bout the head with his ideology. It's heavy-handed even for something explicitly didactic.
https://hpmor.fandom.com/wiki/Dementor
The first few chapters of HPMoR are fine, I suppose. It's pretty lighthearted. But it rapidly devolves into unhinged ranting at extreme length. The last five hundred thousand pages are a vehicle for the "wisdom" of one of the most insufferable, unjustifiably arrogant, and misinformed people to ever draw breath.
Just go read Elon Musk's Twitter feed. Same experience, whole lot shorter.
https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor
tl;dr the science is bad, the writing is bad, the pedagogy/didactics is atrocious.
(interesting tangent https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-... )
Before reacting to what might seem like flame bait, I tried to stay in style to the article and would like to point out that the ‘gag worthiness’ is intended and part of the joke.
[0]: see My Immortal if you want to witness Harry Potter and Twilight get butchered at the same time.
Perhaps a subset of HN is just excited to take the "rationalist" movement down a peg, which I suppose is a positive development.
But it's a lot like the vitriol I see towards effective altruism. There's a good idea there (i.e. wanting to train oneself to think rationally, or wanting to do charity in a way that achieves the most good for the amount of money given). It's a bit sad to me that because the representatives of these ideas are flawed (rationality, LessWrong, Eliezer), or because they've been used as cover for shitty behavior (effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried) that the consensus becomes "there's nothing good here and it's all bullshit".
This pattern of throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems absolutely pervasive in modern discourse, you can see variations of it in people's thinking on vaccines, racism, democracy, journalism, freedom of speech, and global warming, to think of just a few examples.
Sorry, this became kind of a rant, but I really wish our internet discourse could do a better job of filtering babies from bathwater than it currently does.
I have always formulated this for myself as follows: Any sufficiently strategic self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism. Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
But "bad people" or aholes also have usefulness. You sometimes need people to challenge things that only an unreasonable person would challenge. And you need the occasional Steve Jobs too.
But unlike altruistic people, we generally don't give the aholes as much credit. So, ironically, perhaps altruism is the better self serving strategy.
Some degree of assholes and psychopaths make for robust systems that protect against abuse, intentional or accidental.
And the failure modes and pathologies you describe are external: an exploiter is by definition not part of the group of altruists and that makes them a perfect example of how few assholes it takes to ruin things.
The fact that the problems I pointed out are external is because those were just the most obvious failure modes, do not take it as an exhaustive list.
You mean like back when it was kind people and not warlords, and rich scum, and Genghis Khan being the winers?
Meaning "this is the case only on recent history? What about those examples from thousands of years ago".
(I think it's notable Steve Jobs's largest business successes happened after he got married.)
https://youtu.be/jgr-CpLNCYo
This "sufficiently strategic self-interest" is the same kind of non-existing unicorn as the "sufficiently smart compiler".
>Empathy is just evolution's way of encoding millions of years of this observation into our emotional response system.
Evolution (if we abstract it as a thing with intentions) is satisfied with the survival of the species. If the individual perishes, it's fine as long as they either protected their offspring or helped the others in their species survive, there will be more of them (because this actions help the species survive more and make more copies of itself, so species with members who will sacrifices themselves for the species get an advantage). Individual ants and bees for example will sacrifice themselves for the collective.
So, empathy that drives altruistic acts is not the same as "strategic self-interest". If we are to see it in a reductionary way, let's do it properly: usually it's the interest of the species (or the offspring) driving it.
I'm sorry for that bug in the system, sir; we were short of time while designing this whole shebang. The happiness of the individual and a bunch of other things were not really a goal but, as you have cleverly noted, a biochemical feedback to get them to play. But now you have outgrown natural evolution--our sloppy design strategy--and you can fix this bug on your own. Off the top of my head, you could add a magic mushroom that makes people immortal and infertile. But surely you can come up with something better. Now back to enjoying my retirement. God.
/s
There’s something about that line that captures the essence of the whole story for me.
> "...Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."
Does this writer know my deepest thoughts while I'm at the mall!
…I’ll be in my bunk.
This beautiful story has made me realize the same thing happens when using "intellectual" jargon.