YHK - yet another hacker news clone

> My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill.

What makes you think the author has poor reading skill?

Do you not think their belief to some extent involves believing formalizing things [even to a reductively useless point] makes them more adept at understanding the world?

I'll cite an example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-.... I can make the case that one might feel smarter simply having read through the grating writing.

What's a magless? Is that some weird variation on muggle? If so, oh my god, get a life.

Like a certain Terry Pratchett character you think you are a wizard but also spelled wizard wrong...

I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.

After a quick Google you seem to be right that it is falsely attributed. Blaise Pascal does seem to be the most accepted originator however.

>> “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain

> Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.

Not false: Balzac published first, Pascal second:

* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

But "a lot more" is not a bounded heuristic. A good communicator would use more words to defend and idea than to present it, but way less than a bad communicator.

Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.

Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.

This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.

Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.

Oh, I assure you that I don't trust my imagination on this!

Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.

So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)

And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.

It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.

It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...

And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...

Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol

Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."

And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"

At that point I was like whoa.

Here's a bunch of research stuff on ambroxol and Parkinson's:

Ambroxol-induced rescue of defective glucocerebrosidase is associated with increased LIMP-2 and saposin C levels in GBA1 mutant Parkinson's disease cells – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26094596/

Ambroxol as a Treatment for Parkinson Disease Dementia – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

Protocol of ASPro-PD: a phase 3 trial of ambroxol to slow progression in genetically stratified Parkinson’s disease – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-026-13683-7

Ambroxol as a disease-modifying treatment to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in GBA-associated Parkinson’s disease: a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase II trial. The AMBITIOUS study protocol – https://neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000535

Ambroxol for the Treatment of Patients With Parkinson Disease With and Without Glucocerebrosidase Gene Mutations – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

It's wildly interesting. I'm super curious.

So a thing with these studies is that it's looks like ambroxol doses for Parkinson's need to be substantially higher than the cough-syrup/OTC-mucolytic doses. Seemingly to get enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. So this doesn't pin down any pulmonary foundation for Parkinson's.

But it is very, very interesting that... practically all of the stuff that impacts Parkinson's for better or worse always has a pulmonary element. All of it, as far as I can tell. But I don't know! I'm just seeing a structure of evidence as leaning a certain way. Could just be my imagination. And I don't trust it. But I'ma keep reading for sure.

It’s not a dataset of one (you’re not alone!), there is a huge corpus of data and nicotine is one of the most addicting substances known to humans. I cringe reading anyone saying “nicotine is great”—because I’ve been there too and it’s literally one of the most devilish things ever.

I see this said all the time and I think it's almost entirely wrong.

(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)

"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.

"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)

"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.

(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)

"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)

"sacred texts": see above.

"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that. If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.

You might be able to make an argument that Roko's basilisk is an example of a heresy within rationalism? But I don't think the existence of inside-baseball debates where some positions are officially deprecated is terribly specifically religious. The idea that goto statements are a great way of structuring a piece of computer software would be a heresy, for instance. Belief in "cold fusion" would be another. But computing and physics aren't religion-like in any useful sense on that account.

Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.

Most countries have laws that tax all tobacco sales and direct those proceeds into public education campaigns that warn of the dangers of nicotine. These are multi-million-dollar PR campaigns; I like gwern’s essays but they don’t stand a chance against that level of background radiation. A normal person essentially cannot be convinced that nicotine is safe.

I cannot speak on behalf of Hacker News commenters that are not myself, I can only defend my words, which were far milder than that.

> None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering).

This one is thoughtful correcr observation: "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"

It is not snearing, it is factual description.

> Things survive for no good reason.

And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.

I guess maybe, but it's not intrinsically linked to the event. Like maybe Christmas would be useless if only I celebrated it, but it has a purpose if lots of people celebrate it. Also Christmas is probably not a good example but you get the idea.

OT, but my understanding is that recipe sites have long-winded blog posts in front of them because recipes alone are not copyrightable.

To be fair, the Rationalists _do_ accept the two-word rebuttal "Chesterton's Fence," in principle.

...though yes, in practice if your invoke or, they're fairly likely to explain in elaborate length why it doesn't apply here.

well yes, that is what the word "merely" in the original quote means.

That kind of response is exactly why the Rationalists aren't taken seriously.

It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.

You need a combination of both openness and intelligence to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. We don't need to debate whether or not I'm secretly a dolphin.

Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.

The list of counter examples is some of the most popular and well-received posts in the rationalist community which are actually in favour of tradition having value.

"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.

I didn't intend to fully contradict what you said, but to make a stronger case, and address similar remarks by others--you made the best comment along those lines, regardless of your balance and nuance.

What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.

In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.

So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.

... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?

> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.

Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.

What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?

For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.

Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?

To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.

So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?

"On balance they are still bad" is a statement that one justifies by actually comparing the good and bad properties. It seems pretty clear (though I could be wrong!) that for cocaine the bad outweighs the good. It's less obvious for nicotine or, to name another legal stimulant drug, caffeine.

But apparently spending 30k words trying to explore the tradeoff is a bad thing? Because it should just be obvious that Nicotine Is Bad on balance, without weighing up the benefits and the harms?

I dunno, maybe gwern's article about nicotine is in fact terrible. I've only looked at it very briefly, and superficially it looks reasonable to me.

"But it turns out that actually nicotine[1] is addictive and bad for you -- Alex's post had a link supporting that." Eh. Alex's post had a link to something that ... actually could be fairly summarized as "I haven't found nicotine[1] addictive and it seems to be good for me overall". What Alex presumably has in mind is the three tweets at the end of the article, under the heading "PS: Be careful". One claims, not giving any evidence, that a bunch of people read gwern's article and ended up addicted to tobacco. One claims, not giving any details, that gwern's article "almost ruined my life". One sketches a way someone could end up in trouble after reading the article, though it isn't clear to me whether its author is saying "this is what happened to me" or "I can imagine this happening" and it looks much more like the latter.

[1] Throughout this paragraph "nicotine" means "nicotine not taken by smoking or vaping"; it isn't surprising that there might be a difference and gwern's article very strongly advises not doing those things.

If you weren't predisposed to think ill of gwern and his writing, would you actually be impressed by this? On the one hand we have what looks like a careful weighing of harms and benefits, with references to the literature; on the other hand we have at most three anecdotes with no details at all. It could still be that they're right and gwern's wrong, of course, but "look at this loser, he posted all those words and here are three tweets that point the other way" doesn't seem like much of an argument to me.

Other HP fanfics aren't foundational texts for a worryingly influential pseudo-philosophical movement.

It's a recruitment tool.

That's correct. Harry Potter fanfic is a huge part of the rationalist movement, the Zizians, and more. Behind the Bastards' episodes on the Zizians do a fairly well-cited dive into it.

It’s real. The excessive length is one of several things that serves as a filter. Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end. It even includes completely unnecessary uncomfortable parts like the rape threat sequence which further filter out all but the true believers.

The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.

Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.

I think you should look into what it is. It's not "just a fanfic", it is considered a foundational text for the Rationalist movement.

It's not just relevant because Yudkowsky wrote it, it's relevant because it essentially serves as Rationalism's "Torah".

> enjoy the world of the story

I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.

Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic. In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.

"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."

Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.

In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this. You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/

Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)

What’s even worse is that the man has a huge following who all think that he isn’t a bullshitter.

He manages to bring every discussion back to: how it's good to believe literally in religious fairy tales, tidying your room, only eating meat, no one else apart from him should decide the meaning of words, and some fever dream he had about lobsters.

Let's start with the premise that I'm not okay. So what am I going to do about that? Well I could say woe is me. Where the bloody hell is that going to get me? Now let's presuppose that I am destined to—

Ughh!

Peterson fallen in a profoundly sad, but also illuminating, way. He obviously had a bit of NPD even from the start, which is true of virtually every public figure. The crack widened and finally split with the help of powerful drugs - fame, money, and Xanax, with a side of audience capture. He quickly went from "liberal Canadian rationalist with the gumption to push back against the left on principle" to just another unthinking right-wing parrot. His view of strength hurt him here, because he was in a crucible that broke him and yet he clearly could not admit it. Contrast him with someone like Sam Harris who, IMO, has been in the crucible for longer but who is far less pugnacious and has managed to maintain his sanity and his nuanced principles despite the forces that want bimodal commentary only.

That feels like a "no true scotsman"...

In the context of this discussion, rationalist should be taken to refer to people who are or have been active on LessWrong

What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.

I agree.

I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.

To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.

There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.

With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.

I have never seen a room get colder than when I told a bunch of rationalists that intuition has value.

Making rational decisions means picking the most responsible option given imperfect information. It doesn't mean delaying decisions until you have perfect information because that point never comes.

Yeah sure. Writing is a way of structuring your thinking. Now whether you need to air that out to the public is a question of character. I tend to do 90% of writing purely for myself and need to force myself to write a blog post, for others that may differ.

Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.

Length is no substitute for substance. However, reality, as they say, has an surprising amount of detail. That means if someones goal is to adequately represent it you will not be able to do so in a engaging, polemic one-liner that puts everything neatly into a box.

Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.

I would say it is spot on based on what they do, despite being based at doing the opposite.

The heart of science is not doing this but checking your reason against reality constantly.

It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.

Their stated key goal is avoiding it, sure. But in practice?

My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".

Not sure - perhaps true for an oversocialized subset or people who try to wield and gather social influence.

Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.

Pretty unfair of you to conflate a movement's stated goals with its behavior when the comment that you are replying to is very obviously talking about the latter. So rationalist!

Totally agree, it's like their singular defining characteristic.

It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.

I think their self-criticism is an act, a sham to make their arguments look stronger. They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors, especially if they come from outside the rationalist community.

It's like this:

I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.

Ask any cryptographer how well that works.

This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.

Ahh yes, the extreme intellectual humility of lesswrong and the EA guys! ;)

Yeah but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves? Are they open to criticism they didn't come up with themselves?

I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.

Why?

Another example which is borderline unreadable is Zvi.

This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.

I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.

>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.

People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.

The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.

Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.

That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.

The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp. It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)

Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.