What is the verdict on the LessWrong guy?

His books seem to be rated very highly without much critique if at all.

Other urls found in this thread:

intelligence.org
lesswrong.com/lw/1xh/living_luminously/
rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko.27s_Basilisk
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky#More_controversial_positions
fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
hpmor.com/chapter/6
intelligence.org)
intelligence.org/files/LogicalInduction.pdf);
slatestarcodex.com/)
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/everything-list
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I was interested in LessWrong back in the day and came to the conclusion that it was a cult (I also viewed the conversations they had there on whether it was a cult and why outsiders might think that, and came away with the same conclusion despite their protestations).

Yudkowsky himself strikes me as someone deeply resentful of academic credentials because he does not have them, but has a strong desire to be a world-moving intellectual figure.

I can't speak as much to the content, because I've never been into game theory or Bayesian stuff or utilitarian ethics. I also hear that things have changed in more recent years and he doesn't contribute so actively anymore. Apparently he runs sort of institute that takes donations with the promise of making sure that AI is 'friendly' when the singularity 'happens,' and the institute sees itself as literally on a mission to save the world. Again, typical cult stuff.

I'm only familiar with LessWrong because of the Roko's Basilisk stuff, which is a fairly interesting idea, but not what Yudkowski was hoping would come out of his project.

Doesn't seem too cult like to me, I don't know how much control he exerts over the members daily life. This tends to be the definition of cult that matters to me anyway, the term "High Control Cult" or "High Demand Cult" is often used to distinguish something like the average protestant church from something like The Watchtower Society or Scientology.

Of course this distinction is just a matter of convention. The average protestant church doesn't exert any excessive control over it's members because average christianity is perfectly in sync with secular humanism and the division of church and state.

Similarly, all governments could be considered high control cults except for the most disorganized and distant ones that fail to shape the daily lives of their citizens.

>I don't know how much control he exerts over the members daily life.

This was a while ago, but I remember learning that:

-They encourage donation to a pseudo-academic organization that seems to exist for the purpose of money laundering (they publish various non-peer-reviewed papers and it's unclear where the money goes other than to their members' 'costs of living,' which seems to mean they pocket it):

intelligence.org

-They claim that such donations are morally imperative because the organization seeks to save the world from malevolent AI

-There is a weird thrust toward non-traditional sexual practices in the community, especially polyamory (which is seen as 'optimal' or whatever), and many of its higher-ranking members seemed to engage in these practices with other members of the community and even while living with them, and it seemed that Yudkowsky himself had used his status to trawl for sex with other 'rationalists'

-There is a bizarre focus in their philosophy and thought experiments on torture, control, etc., and insinuations that people who do not agree with highly debatable or even intuitively repugnant conclusions (it's more optimal to torture people than to have millions of people get a speck of dust in their eye, etc.) are behaving irrationally

-They have a group of writings called The Sequences, which someone is supposed to read to become 'initiated,' and which seem to bear some similarity to levels of cult indoctrination or increasing tiers of esoteric dogma (those who disagree with them are told to go read them, or if they have, to get smarter until they can understand them)

-The community is awash in its own jargon, much of which recapitulates issues that already have commonsense or technical terminology assigned to them – despite a long-standing hatred of academic philosophy, for example, they seem to have reinvented a good amount of mainstream academic terminology and these terms are used hermetically

-There is a cult of personality surrounding Yudkowsky himself, which as I hinted at may have led to sex things

Here's a typical example of an article that strikes me as cultish:

lesswrong.com/lw/1xh/living_luminously/

>I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible over the past several years. While I am not (yet) perfectly luminous, I have already realized considerable improvements in such subsidiary skills like managing my mood, hacking into some of the systems that cause akrasia and other non-endorsed behavior, and simply being less confused about why I do and feel the things I do and feel.

Much of the community seems to revolve around 'hacking' oneself to rearrange one's core (including moral) beliefs to be more in line with the relevant dogma, which bears a similarity to self-policing and brainwashing.

Definitely a Cult, literally worship progressive meritocracy, but unfortunately a intelligent cult who know their robotic logic niche quite well.

>rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko.27s_Basilisk

so I knew about this meme but I never realized how seriously these idiots took it holy shit

rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky#More_controversial_positions

>-The community is awash in its own jargon, much of which recapitulates issues that already have commonsense or technical terminology assigned to them – despite a long-standing hatred of academic philosophy, for example, they seem to have reinvented a good amount of mainstream academic terminology and these terms are used hermetically

Holy fucking shit this so hard

>those who disagree with them are told to go read them, or if they have, to get smarter until they can understand them
I've been told that here as well, can't remember what though maybe Sloterdijk

HPMOR is peak fedora.

>that quote
gee whiz

>The community is awash in its own jargon, much of which recapitulates issues that already have commonsense or technical terminology assigned to them – despite a long-standing hatred of academic philosophy, for example, they seem to have reinvented a good amount of mainstream academic terminology and these terms are used hermetically

Why do nerds tend to fall into this trap?

Several of these make the 'rationality community' seem similar to Objectivism or Austrian economics

>they publish various non-peer-reviewed papers and it's unclear where the money goes other than to their members' 'costs of living,' which seems to mean they pocket it. . .They claim that such donations are morally imperative because the organization seeks to save the world from malevolent AI
>There is a weird thrust toward non-traditional sexual practices in the community, especially polyamory (which is seen as 'optimal' or whatever), and many of its higher-ranking members seemed to engage in these practices with other members of the community and even while living with them, and it seemed that Yudkowsky himself had used his status to trawl for sex with other 'rationalists'

Yeah that sounds like a cult alright.

What's wrong with Austrian economics?

someone post that thing he wrote about trying to rationally explain to his gf why he wasn't interested in her

the guy's a goldmine of bullshit if you're into self important online weirdos. i remember reading a thread years ago (i think it was on somethingawful) that was all about mining his site and community for retarded shit. it included actual academics shitting on his dumb ai beliefs.

one thing i remember was a blog post where he tried to justify why he never achieved anything beyond blogging and harry potter fanfiction despite claiming to be a unique scientific genius. it went something like this: he is afflicted by unique motivation issues (hundreds of times stronger than the motivation issues experienced by mere mortals). thankfully he has the superpower to overwrite his brain at will, so he could fix the motivation issues at any time and reach his full potential. but he fears such a brain rewrite could be accomplished only once in his lifetime, so he's waiting for the right moment. it's only when humanity truly needs him that he will transform into a superhuman visionary leader who will reverse entropy and banish death. for now it's just blogging and harry potter fanfiction. his clark kent days, if you will.

it's peak fedora with sudden and inexplicable references to child rape every few chapters.

...

Where? I don't remember those.

>I remember reading a thread years ago (i think it was on somethingawful)
Why would you admit to being a retard?

>Given a task, I still have an enormous amount of trouble actually sitting down and doing it. (Yes, I'm sure it's unpleasant for you too. Bump it up by an order of magnitude, maybe two, then live with it for eight years.) My energy deficit is the result of a false negative-reinforcement signal, not actual damage to the hardware for willpower; I do have the neurological ability to overcome procrastination by expending mental energy. I don't dare. If you've read the history of my life, you know how badly I've been hurt by my parents asking me to push myself. I'm afraidto push myself. It's a lesson that has been etched into me with acid. And yes, I'm good enough at self-alteration to rip out that part of my personality, disable the fear, but I don't dare do that either. The fear exists for a reason. It's the result of a great deal of extremely unpleasant experience. Would you disable your fear of heights so that you could walk off a cliff? I can alter my behavior patterns by expending willpower - once. Put a gun to my head, and tell me to do or die, and I can do. Once. Put a gun to my head, tell me to do or die, twice, and I die. It doesn't matter whether my life is at stake. In fact, as I know from personal experience, it doesn't matter whether my home planet and the life of my entire species is at stake. If you can imagine a mind that knows it could save the world if it could just sit down and work, and if you can imagine how that makes me feel, then you have understood the single fact that looms largest in my day-to-day life.

Written back in 2001

You can tell by the covers that he only reads genreshit.

the part where mcgonagall thinks harry is a rape victim.

the part where draco vows to rape luna. he's 11, she's 10. the chapter was later edited to be slightly less fucked up but the gist of it is still there.

the part where the sorting hat jokes about draco raping harry.

the part where the sorting hat says that numerous hogwarts students that it sorted were rape victims, and some were pregnant from the rape at the time of sorting. hogwarts students are 11 when sorted into houses.

the part where dumbledore sneakily confirms what the sorting hat said about pregnant raped 11 year olds (that was in a "non-canon" joke chapter and i guess the author wanted to reassert the child rape in a "canon" chapter)

those are the early ones that is remember, i assume he got some shit for it because it gets more sneaky later. the references are more veiled but still there (like when snape leads an older student who has a crush on him into a dungeon and the student thinks they're gonna fuck but instead snape asks about hermione so the student thinks snape wants to fuck hermione, who is twelve). the author really wants to make sure the concept of a child being raped never leaves your brain for too long.

something awful used to be a pretty cool place

The Draco thing is used to showcase how horrible he and the system of government in Wizarding Britain is.

The rest is jokes, parodies of topes in shitty smut fanfics, extremely sparse among the chapters.

I'm not sure you can really interepret is as the author supporting the idea.

Do you consider every WW2 movie as supporting Nazis just cause it depicts them?

It's cool that you want to showcase how bad of a person Yudkowski is, but you shouldn't be dishonest about it.

>linking rationalwiki
kys

>Do you consider every WW2 movie as supporting Nazis just cause it depicts them?

no, i consider injecting endless references to child rape into a parody of a children's book to be indicative of an unhealthy obsession with child rape. is this really a controversial statement?

>tickling
my nigger
who is this

fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
>Words: 661,619

One thing used to showcase how bad someone is and three jokes among 661619 words is endless?

god what a faggot

Chances are you've been much worse 16 years ago.

me at 3 years old > Yudkowski at 21

Holy... I am in a cult now

i listed six examples, not three. there are a lot more in the actual book and it's the regularity that's disturbing, not the relative volume. why insert repeated child rape jokes into a book about 11 year olds at all? they are usually non sequiturs that serve no purpose. why is the sorting hat talking about raped 11 year olds moments before joking about harry being sorted into "the international house of pancakes"? am i supposed to laugh at the idea of little girls being made pregnant by rapists? what is going on? why are you even defending this?

Let me sum up the basic worldview of this autism legion in one sentence:
> DUDE BREN IS COMPUTAR LMAO

He's fairly intelligent, and his writings are fairly interesting. There are two main problems with him:
First, lack of classical education in any sense of the word. As points out, they reinvent the wheel with every fucking step. He also didn't read any classical literature at all, which leads to a horrible writing style with anime references, and horrible style overall. Yudkovsky is literally a fedora-tipping redditor who is coincidentally very smart, with every implication.
Second, even though these guys are calling themselves rationalists, they are actually instrumentalists as far as I understand their ramblings. As instrumentalism does not provide any moral system on its own, they are dangling disturbingly close to the Landian AI death cults. Yudkovsky himself might realise the problems with their morals, as indicated by his "Three Worlds Collide" story. But I doubt his followers do.

>why insert repeated child rape jokes into a book about 11 year olds at all?

To show how stupid are smut fanfics that showcase the idea in a serious manner. He does that to some ideas from canon books too, like the idea that Harry would cast an attack spell he knows nothing about (Sectumsempra).

I'm posting my posts because I genuinely don't believe he suppots the idea of child rape.

Child rape is simply the easiest and most accessible example of something universally bad. So it's used when they need to showcase something universally bad (as with the Malfoy raping Luna case, sorting hat talking about pregnant students and so on).
And the joke about Draco raping Harry is just a joke, with much less impact because Draco is presumed to be female here.

I know, but this honey doesn't seem to.

>I'm posting my posts because I genuinely don't believe he suppots the idea of child rape.

well that's peachy then because that's irrelevant to my point. my point is that rape, particularly of children, repeatedly pops up in completely inappropriate moments in his writing, which makes him look like a creep. i'm sure he knows raping children is bad, he just... can't seem to stop mentioning it. you called me dishonest for pointing this out but everything i've written is true.

i understand perfectly that he's portraying wizard society as shitty. he's just doing it in absurdly inappropriate and tone deaf ways because he's a creep.

>haha ghosbusters song I AINT AFRAID OF NO VOLDEMORT
>oh btw parents rape children daily
>haha house of pancakes

>he's just doing it in absurdly inappropriate and tone deaf ways because he's a creep
No one argued with that. These certainly are of bad style, but not really "unexplicable"

i certainly can't explain the motivation behind putting the "sorting hat feels the horror of molested children" thing in the middle of a series of jokes, or why dumbledore makes veiled references to it later in an unrelated conversation. i can only guess.

I still don't think 3 mentions (which you wrote as 4 by listing one scene as two entries, and later called 6) are
>endless references
nor constitute
>repeatedly pops up
but okay.

It's also really dishonest how you claim
>the part where mcgonagall thinks harry is a rape victim.
when she actually thinks
hpmor.com/chapter/6
>Harry's voice was shaking. "That owl does not represent me, my parents never locked me in a cupboard and left me to starve, I do not have abandonment fears and I don't like the trend of your thoughts, Professor McGonagall!"

and Harry himself later adds

>"You think I was," Harry was having trouble saying it, "I was abused?"

>"Were you?"

>"No!" Harry shouted. "No, I never was! Do you think I'm stupid? I know about the concept of child abuse, I know about inappropriate touching and all of that and if anything like that happened I would call the police! And report it to the head teacher! And look up social services in the phone book! And tell Grandpa and Grandma and Mrs. Figg! But my parents never did anything like that, never ever ever! How dare you suggest such a thing!"

showcasing what Yudkowski considers the rational response to said things (repoting it) cause fedora-tipping rational Harry (along with Quirrell in some moments).

Ultimately honey, the only one weirdly focusing on child abuse is you. I guess if it happened to you, it's normal you're like this. My sorries.

>I guess if it happened to you, it's normal you're like this. My sorries.
What a strangely aggressive thing to say. cultist detected

also stop arguing about some shitty harry potter fanfic you fags

>cause fedora-tipping rational Harry
... is Yudkowski's mouthpiece in HPMOR

Forgot this.

So I'm agressive for being sorry a person was abused?

Fuck you, you scum. You're normalizing abuse.

I'm gonna abuse you in a second cunt

>polyamory
>optimal
Despite all the evidence that says otherwise?

You are wrong, read the sequences and maybe if you are smart enough you will understand

i had a childhood free of any abuse, thanks for your concern. but if defending the fedora creep is so important that you need to insinuate i was molested in the process then you're a whole new level of gross and i don't really want to talk to you anymore.

I'm glad to hear that honey. I was just concerned cause you seemed so hanged up upon it.

I believe you can use different points to showcase how bad Yudkowski is. For example the paragraph in chapter 108 where Quirrell berates wizarding society for not letting him help them. This mirrors Yudkowski's thoughts about people who don't join his friendly AI cult and is overall pretty *tips fedora*.

>discussion of a rationalist
>link a rationalism site

>rationalwiki
>"rationalism"
its just made by people butthurt about conservapedia or whatevr

No shit. Crappy ideas like existence of only two genders need debunking.

Rationalwiki is just regular liberal crap. Lesswrong is edgier to the point of actually contesting societal norms if they don't seem 'rational' enough. I even heard that the "alt-right" actually started there before growing into a separate thing.

I think you mean the "dark enlightenment" or "neoreaction" had origins there. Heck, if memory suits me well it was rational wiki who said this.

From what've read Moldbug started before LessWrong but there was overlap between users.

Rationalwiki just wants to paint everyone against them as a Nazi.

There's another, lesser characteristic of cults that LessWrong, and the rationalist community generally (SSC, etc), displays: if you suggest that they are like a cult, or even just a religion, they become incredibly defensive and angry.

I am sure that is (partly) true afterall the wiki is political. But the claim that there is overlap between the dark enlightenment and lesswrong seems to be true.

>There is a weird thrust toward non-traditional sexual practices in the community, especially polyamory (which is seen as 'optimal' or whatever), and many of its higher-ranking members seemed to engage in these practices with other members of the community and even while living with them, and it seemed that Yudkowsky himself had used his status to trawl for sex with other 'rationalists'
I guess this is one thing they inherited from actual rationalists like Russell.

Even without their accusations, in the HPMOR we can encounter passages like
>And now even within Ravenclaw, his [Harry's] only remaining competitors were Padma Patil (whose parents came from a non-English-speaking culture and thus had raised her with an actual work ethic), Anthony Goldstein (out of a certain tiny ethnic group that won 25% of the Nobel Prizes), and of course, striding far above everyone like a Titan strolling through a pack of puppies, Hermione Granger.
Which is not exactly alt-rightey, but not exactly within the liberal mainstream either. If only for the supposed existence of the culturally dependent work ethic.

Is it problematic to praise Indians and Jews?

>Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, often abbreviated HPMOR, is a Harry Potter fan fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It adapts the story of Harry Potter by applying the scientific method to the fictional universe of author J. K. Rowling.
This is literally Chrischan-tier

I think the issue would be that it perpetuates stereotypes but it hardly bothers me personally

The people who read it love it, I couldn't find any negative reviews at all. There were only complains about the Harry Potter amazon book because it wasn't free.

The fact that Jews are superior to whites is always implied, but can never be openly stated, lest the whole masquerade of equality falls. All animals are equal, even if some are more equal.
In fact, I was probably wrong and Yudkowsky didn't want to challenge the liberal worldview, but he is just too autistic to perceive such subtleties.

It seems to be okay to perpetuate positive stereotypes as long as it's about non-whites.

I.e.
>muh dik
>muh physical prowess overall
with blacks.

Fedora tipping autist, cult leader

I've been to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (intelligence.org) and am well acquainted with certain of the people there. They hire actual mathematicians to write papers, of which a recent one in particular is pretty good (intelligence.org/files/LogicalInduction.pdf); regardless of whether or not you think this falls under "money laundering", none of them are paid particularly well (especially by Bay Area standards) and they're producing something of substance (more than can be said of most people in most jobs).

Eliezer is sort of unpleasant online because he's fixated on AI, but I think he actually is fairly talented in some sense. His writing style is terrible though; the Sequences are unpleasantly verbose.

The in-person LessWrong community is somewhat cult-like, but this has more to do with the emotional dysfunction and below-average empathy of its members than with any control Eliezer is exerting (I get the impression he doesn't actually involve himself in much of the drama).

As absurd as LessWrong is, I think the best of the lot (e.g. slatestarcodex.com/) are easily a hundred times smarter and more productive than the typical Veeky Forumsizen, so I think the criticism here seems a little self-unreflective.

I think Eliezer finds the fact of Ashkenazim intellectual superiority so statistically self-evident that it would literally be a waste of effort to point it out explicitly. I don't know of a single "rationalist" who would dispute that conclusion.

>I think Eliezer finds the fact of Ashkenazim intellectual superiority so statistically self-evident that it would literally be a waste of effort to point it out explicitly. I don't know of a single "rationalist" who would dispute that conclusion.
Well, yes. The problem is that once you raised the question of one ethnicity's intellectual superiority over another in USA, you unavoidably get into the unpleasant theme of blacks. Which is why no one would regularly say something like "Jews are smarter than whites". It just has too many nasty implications.

Go back to LessWrong you cultists.

>They hire actual mathematicians to write papers
Not very many papers.

>regardless of whether or not you think this falls under "money laundering"
Why don't you look up the meaning of money laundering.

Scott Alexander is that you? Is Yudkowsky blackmailing you?

>slatestarcodex
Aren't these the guys who completely failed to understand Ccru/Land and then dedicated several blog posts unironically complaining about how he had produced a better mythos than them?

Shush, white male.

Not at all. It's hated by many liberals (because it's patronising, which it is), and most socialists (because muh superstructure).

Exactly the one. It's just one guy. A psychiatrist by training. Make of it what you will.

>If you can imagine a mind that knows it could save the world if it could just sit down and work, and if you can imagine how that makes me feel, then you have understood the single fact that looms largest in my day-to-day life.
jesus fucking christ

Where do I find those blogposts? Curious

I don't know anything about this guy.

All I know is that, at one point in time, LessWrong was an incredibly educational and interesting website.

Now, it's some kind of cult haven for group-think and unmoderated pseudo-intellectualism a la Cracked, and has been since about 2011 (a la Cracked). I've never dug deeply into any of it, but posts like , , and hardly surprise me.

>honey
are you frustrated

yes

Sweetie please

Thread reminds me of this mailing list I was subscribed to for a while. Still not sure what it's really about but they talk a lot about "computationalism" and some "yes doctor" experiment.
>groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/everything-list

What's wrong with cults?

Serious question. People generally adhere to some form of group beliefs. Liberalism is a cult, humanism is a cult, egalitarianism is a cult.

It's not like these people are more spooked than your average cunt, they're just differently spooked.

You seem to have a sound knowledge on sociology and psychology.
Though I hope you do agree that some cults are more harmful as others.

Cult consists not only of a system of beliefs (which may be more and less harmful themselves), but also of a certain societal structure, and these are never good. You may have an ideology, but add a leader, a system of rules of conduct, some followers, punishment for leaving and hatred or disdain for non-members, and you'll get a cult. With some more extreme practices you get a totalitarian cult, though I hope it's still not the case with LessWrong.

This is why I don't like the word "cult". Most sociologists use terms like "High Control Cult" or "High Demand Organization" to differentiate something like Scientology from your local chess club. One will attempt to control your entire life, putting you at odds with "mainstream society", and the other will not.

But it should be noted that sociology/anthropology takes a largely relativistic position on this. Whatever the hegemonic social order is, will be the measurement by which all other groups are deemed to be High Control Cults or merely harmless social clubs.

Today, If you were to build a pyramid in Kansas and begin sacrificing prisoners of war on it, your organization would probably be deemed a high control cult. If you did this in the Americas about 500 years ago, it would just be an extension of the hegemonic social order of the day.

Harmful as defined by which cult?

By the mainstream society, of course.

Well to be fair the above posters here and here explain it better
I am more familiar with psychology as sociology so I have a slightly different definition of a cult but the above posters are probably more correct

That is a good point

Mainstream society broadly functions structurally the same as cults do though.

Cult just seems like a derogatory term for subculture or counterculture.

I agree with you for me it is similar. I would only differentiate cults with rituals and without. Not all cults have eloborate rituals which increase trust.

But I suppose you could make the point that even mainstream society has rituals.

It seems to me that 'cult-like' behaviour is just a pattern that emerges every time humans congregate around ideas, desu.

Whether it is pledging allegiance to a flag or swearing on a bible or painting your face and chanting war songs (like when people go to a football match) or saying grace around a dinner table or singing the national anthem or getting jumped into a gang or lighting incense in front of a Buddha statue, it all seems like the same thing to me.

That's a sick statue, never seen it before.

One thing to me that marks something as a cult is the secretiveness with which it conducts itself and holds itself out to non-members, and thereby contributes to the hostility displayed to people who attempt to leave the cult. Skateboarding is a subculture, but skateboarders don't prevent people from learning about skateboarding absent intense initiation, require you to cut off your non-skateboarding friends, or harass you if you don't feel like being involved in skateboarding anymore. And it's hard for mainstream society to maintain this level of secrecy, both at a practical level and because its ability to integrate and attract people needs some openness. There may be a level of secrecy at the very top of the social hierarchy in terms of how, and for whom, the society is run, but generally mainstream society doesn't prohibit you from communicating with non-members, close itself off from non-members absent their indoctrination, or otherwise harass you for withdrawing from its norms. Living truly outside mainstream society is certainly more difficult, but it's not as though the members of mainstream society, or even its leaders, hate you for leaving it.

Stop arguing semantics. Everyone is embedded in a society (hermits and the like are the exceptions that prove the rule) and all societies have their belief systems and customs. Not everyone is a member of a cult.

That's fucking stupid

You can be a liberal, surrounded by conservatives, never having met a liberal in your life.

>The people who read it love it

there's no way anyone is going to read the whole thing without already being a part of this dude's following. it's absurdly long (about half of all the real potter novels put together), repetitive and mostly consists of the self-insert hero lecturing everyone he meets. the actual plot is extremely simple, the absurd length comes from endless lectures about rationality and tedious staged ender's game battles between the students. almost none of it goes anywhere and you could edit it down to 10% and lose nothing of value.

(i skimmed it)