Ashutosh Sononey

• Ashutosh Sononey 27 Jul 2024 6:25 UTC

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  on: Most smart and skil­led peo­ple are out­side of the EA/​ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity: an analysis

  The amount of knowledge outside your bubble outweighs the knowledge within it by a truly gargantuan margin. If you entering a field that you are not already an expert in, it is foolish to not consult with the existing experts in that field. This includes paying them for consulting time, if necessary. This doesn’t mean every expert is automatically right, but if you are disagreeing with the expert about their field, you should be able to come up with a very good explanation as to why.

  @Lukeprog posted this few decades ago “neglected rationalist virtue of scholarship”

  Within Rationalism, the obvious filter is the reverence for “the sequences”, an extremely large series of pop science blogposts. In it’s initial form, Lesswrong.com was basically a fanforum for these blogs. So obviously people that like the sequences are far more likely to be in the community than those that don’t. As a result, there is a consensus within rationalism that the core ideas of sequences are largely true.

  I think it’s mostly just cognitive science which is daniel kanehman and others(which is well known), good bunch of linguistics (which I have heard are well known), and anti-philosophy (because we dislike philosophy as it is done), rest is just ethics and objective bayesianism, with a quinean twist.

  Rationalism loves jargon, including jargon that is just completely unnecessary. For example, the phrase “epistemic status” is a fun technique where you say how confident you are in a post you make. But it could be entirely replaced with the phrase “confidence level”

  I think there is a difference between epistemic status and confidence level, I could be overtly confident and still buy the lottery ticket while knowing it won’t work. I think there is a difference between social and epistemic confidence, so it’s better to specify.

• Ashutosh Sononey 6 Jul 2024 12:53 UTC

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  in reply to: Radical Empath Ismam’s comment on: Dis­tanc­ing EA from ra­tio­nal­ity is foolish

  This is lesswrong sequence which kind of compares and discusses scientific skepticism from LW rationality.

  Eliezer often calls scientific skepticism traditional rationality.

• Ashutosh Sononey 8 Jun 2024 2:28 UTC

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  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: What’s Go­ing on With OpenAI’s Mes­sag­ing?

  Either, Sam altman jokes a bit too much if you are in the memer/​redditor mindset you can find a good amount of his tweets to be some form of jokes not to be taken seriously.

  But then again I have found people who over-psychoanalyse all his joke tweets to reaching conclusions like “he has severe trauma and salvation fantasy” so I don’t know where to draw the line in reading his tweets but then again since it’s twitter and elon musk is trying to be funny I generally lean with the former.

  I think a good amount of joking culture was increased by E/​acc memeing their way against AI safety crowd on twitter.

• Ashutosh Sononey 6 Jun 2024 10:18 UTC

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  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Truth­seek­ing is the ground in which other prin­ci­ples grow

  “Popular being more likely to be true” is only a good heuristic under certain circumstances where there is some epistemically reliable group expertise and you are not familiar with their arguments.

  Modesty epistemology if taken to extreme is self defeating, for example majority of Earth’s population is still theist, without the memetic immune system radical modesty epistemology can lead to people executing stupid popular believed ideas to their stupid logical conclusion. I also take issue with this idea along the lines of “what if Einstein never tried to challenge Newtonian mechanics because from the outside view it is more likely he is wrong given the amount of times crackpots have failed to move the rachet of science forward” . I also personally psychologically cannot function within the framework of “what if I am a crackpot against the general consensus”, after certain amount of hours spent studying the material I think one should be able to suggest potentially true new ideas.