turtlegreen [none/use name]

Agreed on the culture around logic and rationality! A lot of reductionism and weird fucking consequences.

I had to overcome/deprogram some of that bias when I was young. Ironically I came to that conclusion by simply trying to be consistent in my rationalism and grounding it in my lived experience, which exposed many of my contradictions.

Rocco’s Basslick: Of course the argument is that this occurs when technology has developed so far that we can’t just unplug it anymore, but that really goes to show how much extrapolation and how many assumptions you have to make just to participate in a conversation about it - and that, of course, is the trap: You have to leave rationality at the door in order to play the rationalist’s game. They act like the more speculative a situation is the more certain we can be about it, when clearly the opposite is true.

Interesting thought, but don’t you think the delta in the last 250 years or so of ice core data works against the hypothesis? In other words if smoothing worked to hide peaks in this way, how would the 1700-1958 ice core data values be possible?

There are also measurable effects of rapid concentration increases, although even the short ones tend to play out on a decadal timeline. Even if the ice cores didn’t capture those effects, it should still be visible in other non-CO2 datasets like evidence of rapid glacier melting or forest fires. (Rapid emissions have much more significant effects than slow pulses.) Afaik we’ve not found evidence of this.

You could also potentially do a statistical analysis to estimate original impulses from the diffused CO2 data as they would still have an identifiable effect even if diffused. I’m not sure what if any research has been done along those lines.

I’ve thought a lot about these self-declared rationalists, and at the end of the day I think the most important thing that explains them and that people should understand about them, is that they don’t include confidence intervals in their analyses - which means they don’t account for compounded uncertainty. Their extrapolations are therefore pure noise. It’s all nonsense.

In some ways I think this is obvious: These post-hoc rationalists are the only ones who think emotions can be ignored. For most people that seems to be a clearly an outrageous proposition. How many steps ahead can one reliably predict if they cannot even properly characterize the relevant actors? Not very far. It doesn’t matter whether you think emotions are causative or reactive, you can’t simply ignore them and think that you’re going to be able to see the full picture.

It’s also worth noting that their process is the antithesis of science. The modern philosophy of science views science as a relativist construct. These SV modernists do not treat their axioms as relative, they believe that each observation is an immutable truth. In science you have to build a bridge if you want to connect two ideas or expand on one, while in SV rationalism you are basically allowed to transpose any idea into any other field or context without any connection or support except your own biases.

People equate Roko’s Basilisk to Pascal’s Wager, but afaik Pascal’s game involved the acceptance or denial of a single omnipotent deity. If we accept the premise of Roko’s Basilisk then we are not considering a monotheistic state, we are considering a potentially polytheistic reality with an indeterminate/variable number of godlike entities, and we should not fear Roko’s Basilisk because there are potentially near-infinite “deities” who should be feared even more than the Basilisk. In this context, reacting to the known terror is just as likely to be minimally optimal as maximally optimal. To use their own jargon a little bit, opportunity is therefore maximally utilized by not reacting to any deities that don’t exist today and won’t exist by the end of next week. To do otherwise is to invite sunk costs.

As opposed to things like climate change that exist today and will be worse by next week, but which are almost entirely ignored by this group.

I’ve been trying to understand the diversity among SV rationalist groups - the basilisk was originally banned, the ziz crew earnestly believed in principles that were just virtue signaling for everyone else, etc. I’ve always seen them as right-wingers, but could some segment be primed for the left? To consider this I had to focus on their flavor of accelerationism: These people practice an accelerationism that weighs future (possible) populations as more important than the present (presumably) smaller population. On this basis they practice EA and such, believing that if they gain power that they will be able to steer society in a direction that benefits the future at the expense of the present. (This being the opposite approach of some other accelerationists who want to tear power down instead of capturing it.) Upon distilling all of the different varieties of SV rationalism I’ve encountered, in essence it seems they believe they must out-right the right so that they can one day do things that aren’t necessarily associated with the right. In my opinion, one cannot create change by playing a captured game. The only way I see to make useful allies out of any of these groups is to convince them that their flavor of accelerationism is self-defeating, and that progress must always be pursued directly and immediately. Which is not easy because these are notoriously stubborn individuals. They built a whole religion around post-hoc rationalization, after all.

Nothing is going to happen to the capitalists if they stop maintaining the front now, either.

I’d like to think I’m being a little bit more nuanced than that. My complaint is not about any field of study or pursuit - they’re each great on their own - but about bringing together these very different things under one roof. The reasons why and consequences of.

If this was a mirrored anti-STEM hit then I would be criticizing myself with these statements. I’m not.

Traditionally universities were not vocational schools. They managed well enough for a long time, and they didn’t stand as an impediment to society. Then capitalism came and exploited it and now engineers, artists, and diplomats alike have to deal with the consequences (which often means competing against other). My argument is that we should simply reverse the exploitation - of the trades, of the universities, of the students, and of access to careers.

If we’re to go after the admins and loan servicers etc., I don’t see why we should normalize the abuses they did to the system. There’s really no point in going after the admins unless we’re aiming for systemic changes imo.

As for my comments on “intellectual,” it’s not like someone has to be intellectual to be a good person or that it’s really even that great of a quality. But since that is one of the arguments STEMlords like to make to belittle others, I think it is relevant to point out how training for a career in an applied science is not, all things considered, an especially rigorous intellectual pursuit. Which is fine because it is a horrible criteria to judge anyone by anyway.

I can definitely believe it. And no hate to your friend, or any tradespeople, or trades themselves. Some of them are just caught in a systemic scandal, which probably hurts 99% of them as much as it does everyone else.

“I paid the tuition of a 4-year liberal arts college to learn a trade, now bow to my superior intellect!”

I’ve studied all of the above and the “applied sciences” were by far the easiest (and least intellectual) in my experience.

Learning the humanities, on the other hand, is like studying a proof inside-and-out without a proof to actually study from. There are no toy models, components cannot be isolated, there are no authoritative references, you can’t work backwards from the answer, you can’t coast off of your classmates, and even the best teacher does not guarantee that an idea is going to click in any student’s head. And that’s just for comprehension - a productive mastery is even more intellectually challenging, with even fewer guideposts on the path.

Wrapping vocational training into higher education has caused untold harm to the world imo. Trades like engineering and software development should never have gotten mixed up with the university systems. However capitalism made it all but inevitable.

rolling people up into a ball does bring them closer together, but it’s rude to abduct people in the middle of their day (katamari)