HN user
Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting.
I don't think I understand your meaning here. I'd much rather use Markdown than BBCode or related.
But I have a growing sense that the core argument of The 4-Hour Workweek itself - the thesis that we should be creating loops of income-generating work that remove the human from the loop - is both obsolete and dangerous.
Because of AI?
... But isn't that exactly how people are trying to get massive amounts of code out of the LLMs now?
VA work? AI does it for next to nothing, and better than a VA used to.
Only because most VAs are just bad. The "next to nothing" AI work is still bad; if you don't believe me, just allow Youtube to show you some ads some time. And doing it properly is not at all what I'd call passive income, more like gig work.
There was nothing passive about the godfather of passive income at all.
… Ah, okay, that addresses my last point, I guess. :) But in that case,
The goal is no longer 4 hours; it’s 40 hours of high-leverage work that produces 400 hours of impact.
it sounds like really not that much has changed after all. It's still a "work smarter, not harder" kind of idea, just with the belief that you'll still have to work relatively hard. Which is kind of grim, really.
The first comment I saw there claimed:
Who was winning in remote work? The employees, their families, their kids, their wellbeing, their wallets, even cars went cheap because people don’t need to commute 2hrs everyday. Sure, remote work isn’t for everyone, but it should be always available as an option for who can.
I'm pretty sure that cars very much did not become a bunch cheaper in that time frame.
How did the president manage to influence McDonalds' local business decisions? And how did that lead to McDonald's pulling out of the country?
Asking questions that are absurd is like interviewing developers and asking absurd questions on the grounds that it tests creative and critical thinking.
Yes; what's wrong with that?
Do you suppose that it doesn't test those qualities?
... Is that not how it should be interpreted?
That seems to be how we signal "objectivity" nowadays.
Simple as they are, there are some really aesthetically pleasing penguins on skateboards in there, including from less capable models. (In fact, I would say the Opus series got progressively worse at it over time.)
Fidelity to the original is definitely not how humans would measure "art" in this context.
Even if the models don't break through any particular "uglier than sin" barrier, with a bit more work, presumably the SVGs could become importable into an editor that would let a human apply taste and discretion. Seems to me like a heck of a head-start.
As for conventional diffusion-model stuff, I happen to think there are some pieces of AI art that still look really good even knowing they're AI.
To realize that, it would have to be true. But it isn't, so I can't.
I gave an example elsewhere in the post and I was accused of dishonesty and strawmanning — even though it's obviously something that everyone in that community is expected to believe, because it's true (in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 is true) and because it's specifically highlighted as a fundamental truth in the Sequences.
There was also someone else ITT pointing out that the community are not at all uniform, and that got a pithy response about it being largely "childless white male Americans" as if that is supposed to matter (and disregarding that fully 5% of survey respondents consider themselves not cis, and 19% not straight, which are both way above baseline).
So pardon me if I don't consider this sort of question to be in good faith.
with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics.
There is obviously no such thing.
The clear purpose of the subthread the two of you are engaging in is clearly against HN guidelines.
> Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1]
That graph looks incredibly un-diverse.
Which of age, childlessness, white skin, being male or US citizenship is an "ideology"?
The original timecube.com died (domain registration expiration) in 2015 (shortly after its creator) and timecube.net is a reboot from 2023 (and I can find nothing tying it to the estate or anything like that).
I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y
Yes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale
but in what order? ... One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?
These things become clear by cross-referencing with the actual survey (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZLCk8_L64hen93A2g...).
"couple of". The preposition is often omitted in casual speech.
There is nothing I could possibly say to convince you otherwise, in the same EXACT way I couldn't convince a scientologist that their thetan levels are nonsense.
What on Earth are you talking about?
What is the supposed nonsense that I am supposedly convinced about?
but that is all you disciples ever argue against.
Who is a "disciple"? First off, it's perfectly possible to defend members of groups that one doesn't identify with. But also I don't think the group is a natural category to begin with. I think it is outsiders that are thinking of them as a group to critique them.
You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people
What education do you suppose is lacking here, and what is your evidence for it being lacking? Who are you to draw conclusions about the degrees of random groups of people?
believing to "reason" yourselves to some higher "truth"
Can you show an example of the fallacious reasoning you've observed, and explain how it connects to anything that people like Yudkowsky or Alexander ever said?
using some WILDLY misappropriated and misunderstood mathematical principles.
Can you show an example of such misappropriation or misunderstanding?
Go back and reread yourself in this thread.
I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long.
You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???
No, that isn't at all what I said.
First off, it makes no sense for the other party to characterize my "defense of rationalism" in any manner, because I was not offering such a thing. When I say that something doesn't exist, that isn't defending the thing. The thing cannot be "defended" if it doesn't exist in the first place!
Second, I very clearly did not deny any "material similarity". I said that any such material similarity does not matter.
Third, the truth of Bayes' theorem is not why I am correct, and that's also clearly not what I asserted. Rather, Bayes' theorem is an example of what I am correct about.
There is no non-sequitur there; you misrepresent the argument completely. I did not construct a strawman; I merely gave an example of what "rational beliefs" (which are, again, not articles of faith) entail. The point is that, by the same reasoning, you could equally well make out the hard sciences in general to be "cults". If you think you can look at a title for a work like "The Sequences" and instantly map that to "ooh, scary religious canon!", why does the same not apply to, say, Euclid's Elements?
The only strawmanning here is on your part.
I have no idea what strange or harmful articles of faith other people ITT seem to have in mind. Someone mentioned Roko's Basilisk, and as far as I can tell this is the closest the thread got; but that frankly doesn't qualify, either. It's just a proposed consequence of a particular decision theory, and most of the people who care about that decision theory seem to think it's fallacious. (Whether they can propose a fallacy within that theory, or think that this is a proof-by-contradiction refutation of the theory, I don't really know. Personally I think the latter is far more likely.) If it were actually an article of faith, you would see the equivalent of street preachers using it to solicit donations to MIRI. As far as I've been shown, that doesn't actually happen.
But since I haven't been given any better examples than that, I can't argue against them. No, "the Zizians exist(ed)" doesn't count here, first off because nobody's identified any articles of faith they held; second because nobody's drawn any connection between those and any actual principles of rationality.
And my point is that according to the works that supposedly motivate them, they are explicitly not supposed to do that; furthermore, I'm not actually convinced that they are doing it on anything like the scale that critics allege.
(And no, forming a "community" does not make for an identity. I don't think of myself as a "HN user" and I would certainly never introduce myself that way offline. Similarly for Stack Overflow back when it was relevant, or anything else.)
I'm pretty sure the Angry Dishwasher Man has said it.
I see what you're trying to accomplish here; but adopting the clickbait phrasing ironically is still using it, and it doesn't go over well on HN. Please rethink the submission title; you don't get a chance up front to demonstrate your good faith or clever irony.
I'm criticizing the design of the site (and to some extent the rules that were set up)
So we agree (but the people you're talking about are not moderators). Again:
Everyone involved would have loved to "explain this to people gently". There was no space provided in which to do it.
Onward:
What is it about a bad question that makes answers undesirable until the question itself is fixed?
Many things.
It was partly about working around other missteps of the system design: closed questions that aren't fixed are supposed to get deleted, but the system automating this was deliberately conservative, and in particular would preserve anything that had an answer.
The more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that a third party trying to find a good question with a search engine will find a bad question instead. Sometimes that can be fixed with duplicate linking, but often not.
When a curator believes that a question is a duplicate, and is trying to find the "canonical" version with the best questions and answers, the more bad questions there are, the greater the chance that the curator fails to find that question. This is because bad questions carry a risk of resembling the desired target while actually being about something else.
Answers written for a bad question might be worse because they misunderstand the situation due to the quality issue; and they might be invalidated when the question gets fixed.
Answering bad, low-effort questions contributes to the incorrect impression that effort isn't expected (because the OP gets a reward that might be seen as far more valuable than abstract reputation points: personalized, possibly-working code). It incentivizes more bad questions, when the goal is to preempt bad questions and get people to understand question quality.
Finally, of course, answering bad questions wastes time and effort that could have been spent on better questions.
See also: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808
In fact, people can get more frustrated when a result they consider wildly unreasonable is delivered with a cordial tone.
Right. And the site owners would insist that we adopt that cordial tone, and made multiple attempts to shift the Code of Conduct around in a way that they hoped would lead to more cordial tone.
And people reacting badly to commentary, even when given in a cordial tone, led to people not trying to explain their actions at all. Which led to people being upset that actions were taken without explanation (including in a significant fraction of cases where the system's automatic explanation was perfectly clear enough, frankly).
Seriously: there were many people who came to the meta site after asking a question that literally started with words to the effect of "What do you think is the best...", and then presented as if they could not possibly understand why the question was deemed "opinion-based".
We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context.
No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.
Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.
the people who wrote the mini-faq etc. claim it's because the people who built the site are wrong, as is every other non-personally-invested user of the site.
Yes.
Because it's clear that the people who built the site were wrong, based trying to reconcile the design of the site with what the people who built it said they wanted to happen.
It's obvious, for example, that the reputation system, as implemented, could never give the results that it existed to give (roughly: restrict privileges to those who best understood how to exercise them; encourage regular participation from those whose content would help the site achieve its goal while discouraging lower-quality content that buries the gold needles in a bigger haystack). Here's a discussion from 2023 where a huge amount of clear problems were exhibited (including many by myself), with clear reasoning based in the agreed-upon goals, which led to approximately no action:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/
There were countless efforts over the years to try to explain what was wrong and counterproductive about the site design, which fell on increasingly deaf and even antagonistic ears. As far as I can tell, this was simply the result of profit motive. Maintaining quality standards (and gatekeeping people who expect a different experience) is bad for "engagement" (view counts), and therefore for ad revenue.
I literally cited you an example of such a gathering. Do you refute it or just deny that it exists?
You did nothing to attempt to establish that the gathering was of the nature you ascribe to it, and I see nothing in the Reddit post to support the claim.
Roko's basilisk, which I cited earlier, is an example of the sorts of ideas and beliefs they get up to which are irrational.
You have done nothing to establish the commonality of such belief, nor have you clearly defined its boundaries. You commit the noncentral fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...) here and demonstrate outgroup homogeneity bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity).
Your claim "This group is rational because they call themselves such"
No; my claim is based on reading their work and talking to them.
I never claimed universality.
For your argument to work, you require evidence of a specific belief that is commonly asserted in the community despite a recognition that it is fringe and likely untrue.
I've established that a particularly nasty group came from these meetups, the Zizians.
You did not in fact previously establish that the Zizians "came from those meetups". You merely mentioned them upthread. But even taking for granted that they "came from" the meetups (I haven't checked your current evidence but I'm sure it's adequate), this does nothing to establish that the meetups are "gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them".
Yu Xin's past was exquisitely tragic
Ages passed; now his works betray magicIs the video available not through a proprietary player?
After this the book was pulped and she had some sort of psychotic break during COVID and allied with ultra-right and COVID denialist loonies.
That's quite an extreme shift considering she had previously been a leading figure in third-wave feminism and an OWS activist.
It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere.
It's not a strawman. It's a central example of what I had in mind when I used the word "axiom".
if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms"
They don't refer to wild conjectures as axioms.
they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such.
There is no "blame" going on here. Someone said I sounded like a cult member (which incidentally is insulting and inappropriate on HN; but I thought I would try to steer the discussion back on course) and I correctly explained why that perception is irrelevant. When I said
The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.
That is, in fact, inarguably true. Bayes' Law is an example of that exact sort of thing. If you don't believe that conditional probabilities can be worked out that way, that won't change the fact that conditional probabilities can in fact be worked out that way; and it won't change the fact that in the long run I will be able to exploit your fallacy in games of chance.
The other poster gave no example of supposedly false or unsound axioms, so I cannot be strawmanning by failing to respond to them. My assertion is that such false or unsound axioms are not, in fact, in play. The burden of proof lies with those claiming their existence.
Which claim exactly did I make which you are refuting? Please actually quote it.
When you said:
How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them?
you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings.
As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature.
My point was that It's impossible to distinguish who's a true believer and who isn't.
And my claim is that it's actually trivial to tell who's a true believer and who isn't, because the concept of "true believer" does not pertain to "rationality" (by construction!) but to fringe beliefs, and people who are doing rationality correctly (which I expect to be the large majority) simply don't profess the fringe beliefs (because doing so is inherently antithetical to rationality). Therefore, the fringe 5% are the 5% of people actually saying the fringe thing, and the 95% don't actually say the fringe thing. Trivial.
For example, you won't catch Scott Alexander demanding "donate to MIRI or the basilisk might reach back in time and torture you".
That the meetups of the rationalists re-enforce beliefs, particularly in true believers. Also that these beliefs of the rationalists can be pretty whacky and based on a jenga tower of priors.
And you have done nothing to establish this, and I believe you're incorrect.