Briefly, I think that my experience is dual-booting rationalist social instincts with ordinary social instincts, not in the sense of merely being able to model both but of kind of just genuinely feeling and identifying with both, and from that perspective I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd. To me this is pretty much a cure for the relevant misanthropy, like the normie orientation produces worse reasoning on rationalist terms but the rationalist orientation produces worse socialization on normie terms, and both feel like intrinsically lovable/sensible terms from the inside to me.
I have read your post and think it makes some unfair claims/implications about rationalists.
The claim about the moral obligation to select particular embryos is certainly not clearly true, and it’s possible that your point would be relevant to an adjacent discussion, but it doesn’t actually show people don’t have such an obligation, only that they’re not likely to act on it. Also, If you wanted to, I expect you could have interjected and changed the topic to one of the feasibility of embryo selection. Having interacted with people on LessWrong, it’s rare for them to intentionally shut down discussion about potentially fruitful points, unless they have very good reason.
You say “This from the same crowd that’s often worried about low fertility, with no apparent thought to the contradiction; (most) people don’t want to do IVF when they don’t have to!”
But, aside from this not actually being a contradiction (at least not obviously) , even if it was one, that wouldn’t necessarily imply any one of the people in the group held contradictory beliefs, as multiple people in a group can believe different things.
The person who stated that they thought you looked worse than you actually did was effectively saying that you looked better/more attractive/more beautiful than they expected, which can as easily and logically be interpreted as a compliment as it can an insult, if not moreso.
“most normal people I know are perfectly fine with their level of YouTube, Instagram, etc. consumption. The idea of fretting about it intensely is just like… weird. Extra. Trying too hard.” This is not clear at all.
I am certainly nowhere near sufficiently productive that it’s obvious that whatever else I might be doing in the available time carries more value than the emotional benefit of watching videos, but I am extremely uncomfortable about it nonetheless. This is because it not only takes time in the present, but provides an ever increasing opportunity for ever more intelligent AIs to ‘latch’ onto my mind and modify me into someone who is less and less able to think on my own, or ever do anything else.
I expect ‘normal people’ who are comfortable about this are mistaken to be so.
Finally, I will respond to your comment here:
“I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd.”
Unless you believe that the ‘normie value system’ is as well grounded and self consistent as the ‘Lesswrong value system’ , then the symmetry of this comparision/judgement is an illusion. And I expect that people like Jenn think (with good reason) that the rationalist belief system is indeed ‘more right’ .
William’s recent & excellent (& totally spoiling, don’t read if you haven’t read HPMOR) review of HPMOR comes to mind. Here’s his summary of what the story is about (vague-but-meaningful spoilers):
He gets to explain the thing he’s missing in life in Chapter 6:
“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” Harry defended. “But it was just one of those critical life moments, you see? I mean, I knew that not thinking about something doesn’t stop it from happening, I knew that, but I could see that Mum really thought that way.” Harry stopped, struggling with the anger that was starting to rise up again when he thought about it. “She wouldn’t listen. I tried to tell her, I begged her not to send me out, and she laughed it off. Everything I said, she treated like some sort of big joke...” Harry forced the black rage back down again. “That’s when I realised that everyone who was supposed to protect me was actually crazy, and that they wouldn’t listen to me no matter how much I begged them, and that I couldn’t ever rely on them to get anything right.” Sometimes good intentions weren’t enough, sometimes you had to be sane...
And later in the same chapter:
I’ve been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a cellar. And I’m too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don’t feel obliged to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they’re the children—children who won’t listen and have absolute authority over my whole existence.
What he wants is to have someone he can look up to, the way a child “is designed to” look up to his parents. This is his wish.
And, because this is the kind of story this is, the wish is granted by the devil.
Similarly, the feeling I occasionally have interacting with many people in the world is “they are insane”. In your post you talk about a software dev you met who has only ever used an LLM ~once. Not having bothered to use LLMs a bunch is, like, not being involved in the most important thing happening in the world. We invented new intelligences (not quite life forms, but still!) and they’re ~freely available to interact with! You can use them to do useful stuff! They’re still getting smarter! A software dev can use them for their job!
I want boundaries between me and people that out of touch with the real world. I don’t particularly trust their judgment or want them to have power over my life or to have them involved in my life. And that’s a simplification, also they are here and we all have to work something out.
Now, are rationalists reliably sane? Nope. But sometimes they are. A momentary lapse into reason can occur, and sometimes for an extended time, like hours or months or even years, and that’s exciting.
And also the culture is way better. Around these parts, it is odd not to be in touch enough with reality to have not used LLMs (or at least, if you haven’t done so, then you’ll have some good account of why, rather than it having not seemed worth trying). So the group-level incentives are toward being in touch with reality. If someone writes up an argument that you’re screwing up in some behavior or key part of your life, the expected thing to do is to respond with a counterargument, not dismiss them for being impolite. This is a force toward engaging with reality that most people do not experience.
I don’t know quite where I’m going, but felt an impulse to express some of this attitude toward most people vs rationalist.
I wrote a post in reply to this, which is here: https://justismills.substack.com/p/ordinary-people
Briefly, I think that my experience is dual-booting rationalist social instincts with ordinary social instincts, not in the sense of merely being able to model both but of kind of just genuinely feeling and identifying with both, and from that perspective I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd. To me this is pretty much a cure for the relevant misanthropy, like the normie orientation produces worse reasoning on rationalist terms but the rationalist orientation produces worse socialization on normie terms, and both feel like intrinsically lovable/sensible terms from the inside to me.
I have read your post and think it makes some unfair claims/implications about rationalists.
The claim about the moral obligation to select particular embryos is certainly not clearly true, and it’s possible that your point would be relevant to an adjacent discussion, but it doesn’t actually show people don’t have such an obligation, only that they’re not likely to act on it. Also, If you wanted to, I expect you could have interjected and changed the topic to one of the feasibility of embryo selection. Having interacted with people on LessWrong, it’s rare for them to intentionally shut down discussion about potentially fruitful points, unless they have very good reason.
You say “This from the same crowd that’s often worried about low fertility, with no apparent thought to the contradiction; (most) people don’t want to do IVF when they don’t have to!”
But, aside from this not actually being a contradiction (at least not obviously) , even if it was one, that wouldn’t necessarily imply any one of the people in the group held contradictory beliefs, as multiple people in a group can believe different things.
The person who stated that they thought you looked worse than you actually did was effectively saying that you looked better/more attractive/more beautiful than they expected, which can as easily and logically be interpreted as a compliment as it can an insult, if not moreso.
“most normal people I know are perfectly fine with their level of YouTube, Instagram, etc. consumption. The idea of fretting about it intensely is just like… weird. Extra. Trying too hard.” This is not clear at all.
I am certainly nowhere near sufficiently productive that it’s obvious that whatever else I might be doing in the available time carries more value than the emotional benefit of watching videos, but I am extremely uncomfortable about it nonetheless. This is because it not only takes time in the present, but provides an ever increasing opportunity for ever more intelligent AIs to ‘latch’ onto my mind and modify me into someone who is less and less able to think on my own, or ever do anything else.
I expect ‘normal people’ who are comfortable about this are mistaken to be so.
Finally, I will respond to your comment here:
“I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd.”
Unless you believe that the ‘normie value system’ is as well grounded and self consistent as the ‘Lesswrong value system’ , then the symmetry of this comparision/judgement is an illusion. And I expect that people like Jenn think (with good reason) that the rationalist belief system is indeed ‘more right’ .
Thanks for writing the post!
William’s recent & excellent (& totally spoiling, don’t read if you haven’t read HPMOR) review of HPMOR comes to mind. Here’s his summary of what the story is about (vague-but-meaningful spoilers):
Similarly, the feeling I occasionally have interacting with many people in the world is “they are insane”. In your post you talk about a software dev you met who has only ever used an LLM ~once. Not having bothered to use LLMs a bunch is, like, not being involved in the most important thing happening in the world. We invented new intelligences (not quite life forms, but still!) and they’re ~freely available to interact with! You can use them to do useful stuff! They’re still getting smarter! A software dev can use them for their job!
I want boundaries between me and people that out of touch with the real world. I don’t particularly trust their judgment or want them to have power over my life or to have them involved in my life. And that’s a simplification, also they are here and we all have to work something out.
Now, are rationalists reliably sane? Nope. But sometimes they are. A momentary lapse into reason can occur, and sometimes for an extended time, like hours or months or even years, and that’s exciting.
And also the culture is way better. Around these parts, it is odd not to be in touch enough with reality to have not used LLMs (or at least, if you haven’t done so, then you’ll have some good account of why, rather than it having not seemed worth trying). So the group-level incentives are toward being in touch with reality. If someone writes up an argument that you’re screwing up in some behavior or key part of your life, the expected thing to do is to respond with a counterargument, not dismiss them for being impolite. This is a force toward engaging with reality that most people do not experience.
I don’t know quite where I’m going, but felt an impulse to express some of this attitude toward most people vs rationalist.