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Surely rationalists, who like doing things like calculating the effect of trillions of hypothetical future specks of dust in people's eyes and weighing them against immediate murder, would consider the advantages and disadvantages of respecting a trans person's chosen pronouns beyond the immediate effect of "I tell a lie" vs. "the person might go through with their threat of suicide". I think what is actually going on is a combination of (1) the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be, and (2) the old guard at some point concluded that the danger of AI doom dominates their value function, and that building and maintaining a durable alliance with the US Left is their best shot at averting AI doom.
This might in part be reasonable political calculation (unaligned movements with any amount of influence, in the US climate, tend to be crushed as crypto-outgroupers and pillaged for remaining political capital by both sides; of the two, the Left is in principle more receptive to safetyism and EA/tikkun olam/global paternalism), and in part a certain measure of arrogance by the core personnel (Yudkowsky probably thinks of himself and the handful of people he respects as smart enough to not have their ability as the Wisest and Most Rational Human Beings be compromised by a well-contained set of signalling beliefs, and doesn't think that they stand to benefit that much from potential additional peers that get lost to brainrot in the pipeline).
… just figuring this out? I love the rationalist movement and read a lot of blogs/forums, but it totally falls apart once they start dealing with anything politically charged or that’s socially highly controversial.
A good example is Scott Alexander’s post after the election, where he basically said “I adamantly refuse to believe polymarket was correct by giving odds at 60-40 and the true odds were 50-50” really showed this to me. After the biggest right wing blow out election in recent history, you can’t accept one party had the odds going into it?
…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right
I mean, how many of those stances are about facts, as opposed to values? Separate magisteria.
Part of the problem with Californian Utilitarianism is that while, when pressed, it will recognize that the choice of a utility function is ultimately an arbitrary decision, in practice it always seems to round down to "increase happiness", and therefore to the care/harm moral foundation, and therefore to left wing politics.
To wit, Zizians are functionally communists, Hegelian dialectic and all. They believe that there is a good future out there, they they can be its instruments, and that the goodness of the future washes away all sins they may commit in the service of that future, because the ends justify the means.
Scientific Utopianism is the disease of worshiping reason, and I'm afraid this isn't the last of its incarnations, because without any tempering force to the hubris of men who think they can predict the future, the temptation to make it one's own at all costs is always there. Babel's construction crew is never going to run out of volunteer laborers.
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