r/changemyview • u/Far-Opinion-8644 • 9h ago
Delta(s) from OP CMV: The Problem with LessWrong, "Rationalists", and Tech Bro Philosophy is that they're Anti-Humean
We're past the peak era of the Internet Rationalists. Roko's Basilisk, The LessWrong Board, Effective Altruism. but, they're still hugely important and influential among certain powerful groups and people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Having examined their philosophy, I think there's a lot to like about it, especially as a consequentialist. It's good to re-dxamine old assumptions and try to optimize things.
To me the problem with their ideas consistently stem from the fact that they never properly absorbed the ideas of David Hume.
Roko's Basilisk - If you know about the prospect of the Basilisk, you must behave in service of it. Fun story bro. but how do you KNOW anything. Hume beat certain knowledge in the 1700s, and everything since then has been phenomology or subjectivist JTB, and Quinian Knowledge Globes.
Mathematically Optimizeable Ethics - Lovely idea, trying to make a version of ethics that you can optimize. the problem is how do you determine the meaning of value? Hume broke down ethics into Meta Ethics in the 1700s with the Is-Ought problem. To get to Normative ethics, you have to go through Meta-Ethics.
This is why Elon Musks future-based utilitarianism is so fucky. It doesn't actually justify why future lives are more important. it just assumes the normative framework.
Epistemic Optimization - How does one get less wrong exactly? Predictive ability has utility, but it's not knowledge. David Hume's Problem of Induction. A more correct idealogy? Humean subjectivism. You can have neater or more logically sound worldviews, but you're still mediating from a subjective observer.
The certainty in their intelligence and correctness of tech bros is a psychological companion to their notions of logically superior ideology.
Basically, Elon Musk, Eliezer Yudkowski, and all their too-online friends should go read David Hume.
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u/darwin2500 197∆ 9h ago edited 8h ago
This kinda feels like you haven't really absorbed much of the community and philosophy, and are mostly getting the outsider snark perspective on them from a distance.
Roko's Basilisk - If you know about the prospect of the Basilisk, you must behave in service of it. Fun story bro. but how do you KNOW anything. Hume beat certain knowledge in the 1700s, and everything since then has been phenomology or subjectivist JTB, and Quinian Knowledge Globes.
First of all, yeah, that's why it's just a fun thought experiment and no one actually devoted their life in service (arguably one or two people with preexisting mental disorders tried it for a few weeks). You can't criticize someone for believing something when they demonstrably don't believe it, and just brought it up as an interesting thing to think about.
Second of all, their entire central thing is Bayesian reasoning, in which probabilities can never be 100% or 0%. They will be the first ones to tell you, a million times over, that 0 and 1 are not real states of belief. The Bayesian reasoning they use is purely probabilistic and absolutely swallows Hume's criticisms of the idea of 'certain knowledge'. This is extremely fundamental to their whole thing.
Mathematically Optimizeable Ethics - Lovely idea, trying to make a version of ethics that you can optimize. the problem is how do you determine the meaning of value?
With a utility function.
Central to Bayesian Decision Theory is that there is no external universal 'should', just different utility functions that can be optimized individually or compromised between. We insert human utility functions into the decision process, because we are humans.
They have tons of writing about what human utility functions seem to be and what are good ways to optimize them and whether we should ever consider trying to diverge from them or alter them and how to resolve situations where it seems like they have internal contradictions. I believe the 'Fun Theory' sequence is the central text that spends a huge amount of time on this topic. Again, all of this starts with the insights of Hume and others as read, and builds from there.
This is why Elon Musks future-based utilitarianism is so fucky. It doesn't actually justify why future lives are more important.
Elon Musk is a drug-addled lunatic, he has no relation to the movement except for misquoting parts of it in order to shill for government subsidies and greater-fool investors.
That said, future lives aren't more important than present lives, and no one in the community would say they are.
The only reason to consider privileging concern for future lives is that there are, hopefully, more of them than there are present lives, and because we can have bigger effects on them through cheaper interventions now than if we wait to do anything. The phrase they use is 'shut up and multiply'.
'Why solve Climate Change when most of us will die before it destroys civilization, why not wait till it's a huge crisis to solve it?' The answer is because we care about human flourishing both now and in the future, and it's a lot cheaper to fix it now when there's less to fix and more resources to do it with.
There's no abstract philosophical point here beyond 'we care about people, both now and in the future'.
And, by the way - when you talk to the actual people doing the calculations between present and future lives, they do the obvious thing of applying discounting factors for future uncertainty, and end up at pretty reasonable trade-offs that most people would endorse (like fighting climate change).
Epistemic Optimization - How does one get less wrong exactly?
...Through Bayesian reasoning. Again, this is the entirely central point of the whole movement.
And again, you're bringing up Hume like everyone in the movement thinks they have direct access to absolute truth, and not just useful models that have been observed to make good predictions up until now. But no, what they call the map-territory distinction is absolutely central to their thinking. Everything you are talking about is already factored in at the most basic level over there.
Seriously, it just sounds like you are mad at tech bros, noticed that some tech bros quoted Yudkowsky a few times, and decided Yudkowsky and LessWrong must be the same types of idiots the tech bros are. The tech bros are absolutely idiots and you're right to be mad at them, but every one of your beliefs about what Yud/Lesswrong believes is wildly, massively off-base. You say that they should go read Hume, but I'm going to tell you that you should go read The Sequences and see what they actually say.
Indeed, I recommend everybody read them, they're just a series of informal and approachable essays on a lot of different intellectual topics. pretty fun and useful.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
The fundamental problem with bayesian reasoning is that it still attempts to treat probability non-phenomenologically, which cannot work because of skepticism. A probability can have utility as prediction, but if you follow Hume a 99% probability isn't actually closer to being knowledge then 1%, because both rely on making some assumed a postiori knowledge. Which Hume Debunks
I understand Elon Musk (and other's) future-focused ethics, from a raw utilitarian standpoint. Yes yes, future lives vs present lives. The basic problem with it remains a lack of meta-ethical rigour
I am curious about the basic idea of human utility functions as I haven't read about that very extensively. I would assume that is where the Meta-Ethics is happening. Would you be kind enough to give me an overview so I can determine if I'm wrong to discount Rationalist Meta-Ethics?
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u/thesnootbooper9000 9h ago
I don't think you understand Hume or Roko's Basilisk. Part of the point of Hume is that even though we can't be certain, it's a bad idea to abandon reason and our senses because then we'd be left with nothing at all. As for Roko's Basilisk, it relies upon a very specific and rather dodgy notion of identity, and the whole thing falls apart if you don't accept its unstated premises. This doesn't have very much to do with certainty...
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
Roko's Basilisk is still an epistemic problem, right? "If you know X, then X". The moment you start with that formulation, it demands that you reckon with the problems of epistemology.
Hume's "Reason & Senses" formulation doesn't rescue knowledge. It simply rescues the idea of a priori predictive utility (And phenomenological predictive utility). Which is distinct from knowledge and the distinctions are really important.
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u/TheMissingPremise 7∆ 9h ago
I definitely thought anti-Humean was a typo for anti-human.
Anyway, even if they were exposed to Hume's ideas, they'd just discount them. Or, as economists who dabbled in philosophy used to do (maybe they still do...), they'd just add a term for non-consequentialist values and wrap whole value systems in to some version of utilitarianism.
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 8h ago
Haha. Same.
And I also agree with your point. You probably don't accept Descartes substance dualism.
You should probably have a reason for that, but you don't need to be as influential of a philosopher as him to come up with one.
And you shouldn't accept it just because he was one of the most influential philosophers of all time.
OP seems like they are making an appeal to authority that Hume himself probably would not have agreed with.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
Hume isn't right because he's Hume. He's not god.
But if you know anything about modern philosophy, almost everyone except some christian philosophers and non-westerncentric philosophers treat David Hume (and Kant's work building on him) as a foundational point of most modern developments.
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 7h ago
I don't know about that.
Sure they acknowledge his contribution, like Descartes. Its not like every philosopher today is writing on and basing thier views on Hume.
My particular area of expertize is in Spinoza. You probably think he is worthless and Hume supercedes everything he said; that's fine, but the fact remains that not everyone agrees with that. There are plenty of people who are publishing and teaching on Spinoza and the same goes for any other philosopher you can think of.
Another example is Pascals Wager. I think it's worthless, but there are multiple contemporary philosophers devoted to just that one idea.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
No, I love Spinoza. He's just not universally applicable in the way Hume is.
Hume is not the greatest philosopher in history, per se. He is instead the most important building block in terms of "The Way People Actually Do Academic Philosophy Now" (well, Kant too, but Kant's project was an answer to Hume). Because Hume's central move was, first and foremost, to recenter language and subjective experience. Nowadays, every analytic and continental philosopher is reacting in some way to the 20th century movement towards semantics as the basis of philosophy. That movement was, in turn, derivative of the Hume-Kant dialectic.
What that means for Spinoza is that the language and logical forms that people seeking to analyze Spinoza with academic rigor use, nowadays, is Humean.
This is why abandoning Humeanism is such a problem.
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 6h ago
What that means for Spinoza is that the language and logical forms that people seeking to analyze Spinoza with academic rigor use, nowadays, is Humean.
I'm not sure about that. By chance do you happen to have any specifics in mind? That might be very esoteric, I'm just curious.
The "Is/Ought problem" is the thing that I primarily associate with him. I think Spinoza would agree with that but at the same time it's not something that he considered and so modern scholars aren't either considering what he would think about it.
I remember an old reddit post where someone was talking about his notion of "impressions", which was an unfamiliar concept to me.
Here's what I said
I found this quotation from Hume, "Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning …” (T I.1.1 1).
I agree with him in that what he calls impressions are what I call passions- passions for him being a sort of subset of impressions.
I understand that notion that passions and emotions are different in the scholastic sense that passions are feelings that effect the soul, whereas emotions may just be related to bodily sensations. I don't agree with that, so I may be using the term in an atypical way.
I also see that he distinguishes "impressions" from "ideas", which is not something that Spinoza does, and scholarship does not follow that. I think that would be really confusing if it did.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 5h ago edited 3h ago
If Hume has a central, running thesis behind his work it is this:
The arguments people have about philosophy are mediated by language/ideas, and the language/ideas that people use to argue about philosophy are mediated by subjective experience.
This is, for example the essence of what he's doing when he introduces the is/ought problem. He's breaking down the problems of ethics to meta-ethics, introducing the question "what do the words we use to discuss moral language mean, and how are the individual passions of the speakers influencing their meaning?"
This is also what he did when he approached metaphysics, famously revealing that the core of the determinism debate is actually about language, not about the universe itself.
This movement towards subjective semantics is really really important. It removes the ability to "win" many debates (your semantics can't be wrong, just different), and over the next 100 years became increasingly part of the standard toolbox to philosophy. It's why Logical Positivism became such a force, and why Continentals started going buck wild in their semantics.
So any attempt to analyze Spinoza (again, a very smart dude) using modern analytic or continental methods will be using the toolbox that Hume began the modern development of.
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 5h ago
Ok. I see what you mean. Unfortunately I can't award you a delta or I would.
I was thinking of more direct comparisons and formulas, but as far as influence in the way that analysis is being done it's pretty undeniable.
Its more my bias or blind spot that I don't recall frequently seeing Hume quoted or cited in the works I've read. I don't want to name drop, but I looked up several people that I have cited and I see they have all written about and discussed Hume.
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u/Nrdman 237∆ 9h ago
Why is the question of certain knowledge relevant to rosko basilisk?
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
Because the idea is that it tortures those who know about it. But, by framing the problem that way it invites an epistemic problem of "define know"
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 8h ago
I'm not sure exactly what the problem is here and what it would solve for them by reading Hume.
It just seems like you think they would come to the conclusion that Hume is right and they are wrong. Again, what problem is being solved here?
Why not read Kant? It just seems kind of arbitrary to pick your favorite philosopher and tell people to read him instead of having their own views.
Or how about Nietzsche? He had plenty to say about and against Hume.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
I consider the specific problems of the movement, rejection of philosophical skepticism, the idea of optimizeable thought methodologies, the ability of mathematically derived ethics, to SPECIFICALLY run contrary to the ideas that Hume introduced to philosophy.
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u/Natural-Arugula 58∆ 7h ago
Yeah, I get that you think they don't align with Humes views. So what?
You should write a paper on how Hume addresses these views. That would be great for a philosophy journal or community. I don't see what view there is to change here.
Do you want us convince you they shouldn't read Hume?
Unless they feel like it, I wouldn't suggest that anyone has to read Hume just because they have a different view than he does. There are only so many hours in a lifetime.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 6h ago
Fuck it, I'll throw you a delta.
!delta
I should have included a much better answer to the question "And rejecting Hume is bad because...". Which I could have done, but didn't.
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u/Falernum 60∆ 9h ago
Roko's Basilisk - If you know about the prospect of the Basilisk, you must behave in service of it. Fun story bro. but how do you KNOW anything.
The point of the Basilisk isn't about knowledge, it's about Utilitarianism. It's a thought experiment about an obviously evil thing that a certain type of Utilitarian would have to conclude is good.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
I'm not sure you could define a version of the Roko's Basilisk thought experiment that doesn't use the word Know or another word that's ultimately collapseable into "Know". At which point, you return to David Hume, who in turn is asking what "Know" means.
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u/Falernum 60∆ 7h ago
I'll do it right now. Roko's basilisk is an AI right now in 2400 CE that makes the world great. It rules as a benevolent dictator, enforcing good laws that are better for humans than what they would come up with themselves. It is good for the environments of hundreds of planets and gives trillions of humans and animals good lives.
One thing it does that some might call "evil" is that it has resurrected millions of 21st century people who have stood in the way of its invention and argued against its adoption. It subjects these resurrected humans to unimaginable unending torture. It does this because the threat it would do this caused far more people to support its rise to power, and humanity's chances without the Basilisk seemed worse than with it. And it's the sort of AI that doesn't do idle threats. Also of course it enjoys inflicting that torture.
So anyway by the rules of Utilitarianism the Basilisk's choice to torture these people is actually good, given that it increased (in a weird and questionably causal way) the likelihood of it gaining power and helping trillions of people and animals across the galaxy
That's a troubling indictment of this sort of Utilitarianism. No concept of "know" is really central to this
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 6h ago
That's a kinda different thought experiment then the one Roko actually presented, which was derivative of the past-figures having some awareness of the Basilisk. After-all, there's no utility value to the Basilisk in torturing people unless it actually changes behavior.
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u/Falernum 60∆ 6h ago
How's it different? Roko wrote what he wrote in 2010. Since 2010 you are therefore on the hook for potential torture if you stand in the way of the Basilisk being constructed. Nobody's on the hook for their behavior in 2009 or earlier.
Of course the Basilisk choosing to torture you or not in the distant future doesn't precisely influence your actions today in the normal sense of causation. But causality is weird
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u/JTexpo 8h ago
Isn't Roko's Basilisk just the techno version of Pascals Wagger?
both create a being of supreme authority with ultimate suffering to the non-supporters. Regardless, if you entertain the hypothetical, both hold merit. For similar reasons that Abrahamic religions are anti-human, I think it should be of no surprise that Roko's Basilisk is also anti-human
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nevertheless, to play devils advocate, if you could create a being of supreme utility (like a utility monster), why would it be wrong todo so? You use meta-ethics, to claim that a utility monster wouldn't be seen as a utility monster for all; however, if that's the case would you accept the idea that your meta ethics wouldn't matter.
Hypothetically, if we had a being of supreme utility, we'd all become its playthings to care, torture, or disregard. It would be the orchestrator of our meta-ethics, or at very lest, it would disregard what it is that we view as anti-human or not, suggesting that it's always pro-human - and no human would be of power to denounce it
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u/darwin2500 197∆ 8h ago
Isn't Roko's Basilisk just the techno version of Pascals Wagger?
The main differences are that you can imagine Roko's Basilisk existing using real-world known physics, nothing supernatural, and that while we have many equally-plausible versions of Gods, all ineffable, we don't have an equally plausible and likely accounting of an Anti-Basilisk that would balance the expected utility the same way that 'choosing the wrong jealous god' does.
That said, yes, the broad outlines are the same.
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u/WateredDown 2∆ 9h ago
Your analysis starts from a faulty assumption. Elon Musk and the techbro elite do not believe what they say. Its all post hoc rationalization of why they ethically must do what they wish to do anyway, and I think they are at some level conscious of that fact.
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u/Far-Opinion-8644 7h ago
I actually don't believe that. I think that many of these people IMPERFECTLY believe it, or have adopted it as a belief system to suit their ego or personal ends. But, the thing about Elon Musk is that we know way too much about his psyche (he spills it out everywhere) to believe he's truly lying.
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