It seems like Brexit was basically a small group of rationalists hijacking history. Remain was overwhelmingly likely without the competence of the leave campaign. Pretty impressive.
Of course I’m sure there’s another side to this story, so take it with a pinch of salt.
They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
I was hoping for the rational reason why Britain should have left (I’m only a portion of the way through ), instead of the lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS (which they had no way of influencing and made no plan for the current projects that would lose EU funding).
They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
While we shouldn’t get hung up on definitions, I’m pretty sure the most common meaning of “rationalist” in this community is the former, not the latter.
He says “rationalists have a lot of work to do”, but I don’t think that implies “people who don’t want to do this work are not rationalists”.
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”. That would be totally reasonable. But I don’t think you could say “they aren’t rationalists”. The argument that exploiting others’ irrationality is net bad in the long run, is fairly specific and not obviously true for all sets of values and beliefs.
(This is a separate question from whether Cummings and Vote Leave are such people.)
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”.
I’m not sure this is even reasonable. There’s a quiet majority of people on this site and other rationality blogs and in the real world (including Dominic Cummings, apparently) who learn these techniques and use their rationalist knowledge to “win.” And they don’t give back, other than their actions on the world stage. And personally, I think that’s okay. Not everyone needs to take on the role of teacher.
I consider what constitutes a modern rationalist up for our own definition. My wife gets annoyed that LW style rationalists aren’t like philosophical rationalists.
I don’t know of any other community apart from this one that uses rationalist to mean someone who uses their brainpower to reliably win.
Cummings probably doesn’t consider himself a rationalist (he used the term pejoratively in the article). So I considered The_Jaded_Ones comment describing them as rationalist as being akin to saying they were part of the in group, someone to be admired/emulated.
I’m an uneasy sometime member or the “rationality” community, I’ve been to a few LW meetups. So I’m interested in what people mean when they say someone is a rationalist. Is that the sort of person I will be hanging out with if I go again?
So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.
If the point of “rationality” is evangelism, count me out. But anyway if you want to point to EY quotes, then consider “rationalists win” or the 12 virtues of rationality (which are about winning, not evangelizing).
It is not about evangelising for me. It is about not using tool sets that rely on other people being irrational. If your incentives are to keep people uninformed so that they will do what you want and you “win” then you are reinforcing the status quo of a world of misinformation/fraud and spin. This I think will cause us all to lose long term.
lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS
What they said is that in the longer run, money that used to go to the EU could be redirected to domestic priorities, including the NHS. And many current destinations of “EU funding” are quite silly indeed—do you think paying wealthy English landowners to mismanage their land is a good use of funding, whether “EU” or otherwise?
I’m cynical enough to think that big landowners will still get paid to mismanage their land. They managed to get the EU to do it, I suspect they’ll manage to get Britain outside the EU to do it.
I’m intrigued to find out Cumming’s solution to the political classes, I’ve not found it in all the verbiage yet though.
I think Cummings wants to “raise the sanity waterline.” But rather than argue about that, I think a better definition of “rationalist” is someone who writes about how to think and how to win, particularly in a way comprehensible to LW. He certainly fits that definition.
(I would like to exclude Scott Adams who claims to write about these subjects, and from whom I do learn, but who does not write precisely.)
Maybe Leave won regardless of or even despite my ideas. Maybe I’m fooling myself like Cameron. Some of my arguments below have as good an empirical support as is possible in politics (i.e. not very good objectively) but most of them do not even have that. Also, it is clear that almost nobody agrees with me about some of my general ideas. It is more likely that I am wrong than 99% of people who work in this field professionally.
He himself warns not to be construed as too influential. In this case the Scott’s caveat apply: elections that are won by slim margin don’t say much of significance.
His argument is that although Leave won by a small majority, it should have lost by a very large majority (for various reasons, particularly that the status quo has an advantage in these things) and that that is the large difference we should be thinking about.
I’m pretty sure that in Trump vs. Clinton, Clinton would have won by a large majority if Trump didn’t campaign. But it would be silly to say “Trump should have lost by a large majority” on that basis.
Saying “one side should have lost because of X” implies that X has outsized effect on one side compared to the other. But telling political stories is, like campaigning, something that both sides do and which they pretty much have to do to have a reasonable chance at winning.
The point is that saying “they wouldn’t have won if they didn’t do X”, in a context where you are trying to say something useful, implies that X is some special thing that was only done by them, not that X is something that everyone does. Nobody says “Trump would have lost if he had failed to breathe”, because everyone running a campaign needs to breathe and saying that you don’t win if you don’t breathe is obvious, trivial, and tells you nothing special about Trump.
And “the pro-Brexit campaign did special things which the anti-Brexit campaign did not also do” has not been well-supported here.
I think it’s fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don’t say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a ‘treatment’ effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.
But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.
The problem with politics is that discussion of it tends to devolve into something that’s a toxic mess that serves no useful purpose, doesn’t inform anyone and doesn’t make the site better.
Sure, there are benefits to be had from discussing politics on a rationality site, but I can see the argument against it: previous attempts have devolved into the toxic mess instead of yielding any insight.
This thread doesn’t fit that pattern largely because LW users are aware of the problems with talking about politics and are more likely to stay on the meta-level as a response to that. There is, in fact, not a single argument for/against brexit in this thread, which I think is a shining advertisement for LW comment culture. On the other hand, I think this article is also particularly well-suited for not immediately inspiring object-level argument, at least as long as it’s not posted on /r/news or similar.
Part of the reason is also because this is a UK issue and most LessWrong readers are not from there, so people have a little bit more of a outsider’s or non-tribalist perspective on it (although almost all LW commenters would certainly have voted for Remain).
It seems like Brexit was basically a small group of rationalists hijacking history. Remain was overwhelmingly likely without the competence of the leave campaign. Pretty impressive.
Of course I’m sure there’s another side to this story, so take it with a pinch of salt.
They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
I was hoping for the rational reason why Britain should have left (I’m only a portion of the way through ), instead of the lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS (which they had no way of influencing and made no plan for the current projects that would lose EU funding).
While we shouldn’t get hung up on definitions, I’m pretty sure the most common meaning of “rationalist” in this community is the former, not the latter.
Things may have changed in 8 years. I’m not sure if you noticed that I got the phrase, “raising the sanity waterline,” from this sites founder.
I’m a bit sad that this has been lost if it has.
He says “rationalists have a lot of work to do”, but I don’t think that implies “people who don’t want to do this work are not rationalists”.
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”. That would be totally reasonable. But I don’t think you could say “they aren’t rationalists”. The argument that exploiting others’ irrationality is net bad in the long run, is fairly specific and not obviously true for all sets of values and beliefs.
(This is a separate question from whether Cummings and Vote Leave are such people.)
I’m not sure this is even reasonable. There’s a quiet majority of people on this site and other rationality blogs and in the real world (including Dominic Cummings, apparently) who learn these techniques and use their rationalist knowledge to “win.” And they don’t give back, other than their actions on the world stage. And personally, I think that’s okay. Not everyone needs to take on the role of teacher.
FWIW I agree with this, but it wasn’t necessary to the point I was making and I didn’t feel like defending it.
I consider what constitutes a modern rationalist up for our own definition. My wife gets annoyed that LW style rationalists aren’t like philosophical rationalists.
I don’t know of any other community apart from this one that uses rationalist to mean someone who uses their brainpower to reliably win.
Cummings probably doesn’t consider himself a rationalist (he used the term pejoratively in the article). So I considered The_Jaded_Ones comment describing them as rationalist as being akin to saying they were part of the in group, someone to be admired/emulated.
I’m an uneasy sometime member or the “rationality” community, I’ve been to a few LW meetups. So I’m interested in what people mean when they say someone is a rationalist. Is that the sort of person I will be hanging out with if I go again?
So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.
If the point of “rationality” is evangelism, count me out. But anyway if you want to point to EY quotes, then consider “rationalists win” or the 12 virtues of rationality (which are about winning, not evangelizing).
It is not about evangelising for me. It is about not using tool sets that rely on other people being irrational. If your incentives are to keep people uninformed so that they will do what you want and you “win” then you are reinforcing the status quo of a world of misinformation/fraud and spin. This I think will cause us all to lose long term.
If you read the whole thing (quite an ask, I know!) then Cummings does go into how he thinks we can fix politics.
He also gives his argument as to why leave was the right choice, but that section is fairly brief.
What they said is that in the longer run, money that used to go to the EU could be redirected to domestic priorities, including the NHS. And many current destinations of “EU funding” are quite silly indeed—do you think paying wealthy English landowners to mismanage their land is a good use of funding, whether “EU” or otherwise?
I’m cynical enough to think that big landowners will still get paid to mismanage their land. They managed to get the EU to do it, I suspect they’ll manage to get Britain outside the EU to do it.
I’m intrigued to find out Cumming’s solution to the political classes, I’ve not found it in all the verbiage yet though.
ctrl+f “Why do it?” and “The political media and how to improve it” in the article
I think Cummings wants to “raise the sanity waterline.” But rather than argue about that, I think a better definition of “rationalist” is someone who writes about how to think and how to win, particularly in a way comprehensible to LW. He certainly fits that definition.
(I would like to exclude Scott Adams who claims to write about these subjects, and from whom I do learn, but who does not write precisely.)
He himself warns not to be construed as too influential. In this case the Scott’s caveat apply: elections that are won by slim margin don’t say much of significance.
His argument is that although Leave won by a small majority, it should have lost by a very large majority (for various reasons, particularly that the status quo has an advantage in these things) and that that is the large difference we should be thinking about.
I’m pretty sure that in Trump vs. Clinton, Clinton would have won by a large majority if Trump didn’t campaign. But it would be silly to say “Trump should have lost by a large majority” on that basis.
Saying “one side should have lost because of X” implies that X has outsized effect on one side compared to the other. But telling political stories is, like campaigning, something that both sides do and which they pretty much have to do to have a reasonable chance at winning.
I think the comparison in the case of Cummings and Brexit is to what other pro-leave campaigns would have done, rsther than to no campaign at all.
The point is that saying “they wouldn’t have won if they didn’t do X”, in a context where you are trying to say something useful, implies that X is some special thing that was only done by them, not that X is something that everyone does. Nobody says “Trump would have lost if he had failed to breathe”, because everyone running a campaign needs to breathe and saying that you don’t win if you don’t breathe is obvious, trivial, and tells you nothing special about Trump.
And “the pro-Brexit campaign did special things which the anti-Brexit campaign did not also do” has not been well-supported here.
Well according to the article, he and his team did do special things. Of course you may not believe that, but he presents a plausible narrative.
I wonder what would have happened if Trump had run a very boring, straight-laced campaign though?
I think it’s fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don’t say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a ‘treatment’ effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.
But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.
An argument for embracing, not avoiding “mind killing” politics?
The problem with politics is that discussion of it tends to devolve into something that’s a toxic mess that serves no useful purpose, doesn’t inform anyone and doesn’t make the site better.
Sure, there are benefits to be had from discussing politics on a rationality site, but I can see the argument against it: previous attempts have devolved into the toxic mess instead of yielding any insight.
This thread seems to not fit that pattern. The only annoying content is related to moderation.
This thread doesn’t fit that pattern largely because LW users are aware of the problems with talking about politics and are more likely to stay on the meta-level as a response to that. There is, in fact, not a single argument for/against brexit in this thread, which I think is a shining advertisement for LW comment culture. On the other hand, I think this article is also particularly well-suited for not immediately inspiring object-level argument, at least as long as it’s not posted on /r/news or similar.
Part of the reason is also because this is a UK issue and most LessWrong readers are not from there, so people have a little bit more of a outsider’s or non-tribalist perspective on it (although almost all LW commenters would certainly have voted for Remain).
Yeah, I mean I think there are successes and failures, and I personally think that LW should try to talk more about “real” issues like politics.