LW - Turning 22 in the Pre-Apocalypse by testingthewaters

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Turning 22 in the Pre-Apocalypse, published by testingthewaters on August 23, 2024 on LessWrong.
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Something Different This Way Comes - Part 1
In which I attempt to renegotiate rationalism as a personal philosophy, and offer my alternative - Game theory is not a substitute for real life - Heuristics over theories
Introduction
This essay focuses on outlining an alternative to the ideology of rationalism. As part of this, I offer my definition of the rationalist project, my account of its problems, and my concept of a counter-paradigm for living one's life. The second part of this essay will examine the political implications of rationalism and try to offer an alternative on a larger scale.
Defining Rationalism
To analyse rationalism, I must first define what I am analysing. Rationalism (as observed in vivo on forums like LessWrong) is a loose constellation of ideas radiating out of various intellectual traditions, amongst them Bayesian statistics, psychological decision theories, and game theory.
These are then combined with concepts in sub-fields of computer science (AI and simulation modelling), economics (rational actor theory or homo economicus), politics (libertarianism), psychology (evolutionary psychology) and ethics (the utilitarianism of Peter Singer).
The broad project of rationalism aims to generalise the insights of these traditions into application at both the "wake up and make a sandwich" and the "save the world" level. Like any good tradition, it has a bunch of contradictions embedded: Some of these include intuitionism (e.g. when superforecasters talk about going with their gut) vs deterministic analysis (e.g. concepts of perfect game-players and k-level rationality).
Another one is between Bayesianism (which is about updating priors about the world based on evidence received, generally without making any causal assumptions) vs systemisation (which is about creating causal models/higher level representations of real life situations to understand them better). In discussing this general state of rhetorical confusion I am preceded by Philip Agre's Towards a Critical Technical Practice, which is AI specific but still quite instructive.
The broader rationalist community (especially online) includes all sorts of subcultures but generally there are in group norms that promote certain technical argot ("priors", "updating"), certain attitudes towards classes of entities ("blank faces"/bureaucrats/NPCs/the woke mob etc), and certain general ideas about how to solve "wicked problems" like governance or education. There is some overlap with online conservatives, libertarians, and the far-right.
There is a similar overlap with general liberal technocratic belief systems, generally through a belief in meritocracy and policy solutions founded on scientific or technological principles.
At the root of this complex constellation there seems to be a bucket of common values which are vaguely expressed as follows:
1. The world can be understood and modelled by high level systems that are constructed based on rational, clearly defined principles and refined by evidence/observation.
2. Understanding and use of these systems enables us to solve high level problems (social coordination, communication, AI alignment) as well as achieving our personal goals.
3. Those who are more able to comprehend and use these models are therefore of a higher agency/utility and higher moral priority than those who cannot.
There is also a fourth law which can be constructed from the second and third: By thinking about this at all, by starting to consciously play the game of thought-optimisation and higher order world-modelling, you (the future rationalist) have elevated yourself above the "0-level" player who does not think about such problems and naively pur...