The Rationalism Video I'll Never Make
Added 2026-01-23 04:16:02 +0000 UTC
Comments
I totally understand and respect not making this a main channel video but this is really good! I've listened to it twice and I probably will again sometimes when I'm playing video games.
Doctor Starky
2026-02-18 00:09:01 +0000 UTCConsidering Kelsey Piper wrote pro eugenics dnd fanfic with Yud, I think it's pretty wild that people are trying to glaze her.
Markus
2026-01-27 03:08:02 +0000 UTCSaw some comments glazing certain EA personalities here so I'd like to say that from what I've read of Kelsey Piper, she's a typical ivory tower techno centrist lib who's been hanging out with some of the worst people in the EA sphere and supporting racist and misogynist shit for a long time. She's also doing evangelist work for AI now. Re the 2024 election, she wrote" Most republicans were (rightly) furious at the Biden presidency + DEI + immigration + inflation and think the US government needs aggressive immediate change, but they are not sociopaths and the scocipaths are learning that no, mass death still isnb't cool and fun". Like both extremely wrong, extremely cruel, and extremely helpful for fascist and right-wingers. You cut a centrist and a fascist bleed. Every time. We're in January 2026 now. With what's going on around the world, is this the kind of people we wanna glaze?
resnet
2026-01-26 21:21:50 +0000 UTCIntroducing Scott Alexander by highlighting his racism is the only way to do it, kudos. We've gained nothing by pretending that there's more to him than a machine for popularizing racism and misogyny so I'm glad that's all you had to say about him.
Richard Jackson
2026-01-26 14:05:07 +0000 UTCwhile "rigged" works as a generic word for "not fair", the equivalent to "loaded die" is usually "weighted coin"
Jonathan P
2026-01-26 05:14:51 +0000 UTCMan, did I pick a good month to become a patron! I have to ask, have you (or anyone else on here) read Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer? I think it’s a must-read, and pretty unique, critique of the rationalist community that covers some of the same ground in this video, albeit often from a bit of a different perspective.
Thomas LeSage
2026-01-25 11:54:51 +0000 UTCNeither company is ethically flawless, but IMO there are some meaningful differences: Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI because they were worried about safety being deprioritized for commercial speed. In 2024, OpenAI disbanded its Superalignment team after both leaders quit; one was hired by Anthropic. & structurally, Anthropic was set up as a public benefit corporation from day one, which legally requires balancing profit with public good. On the product side, Anthropic developed Constitutional AI, which means Claude is trained against an explicit set of ethical principles that are publicly available, rather than just vibes and human feedback. They recently published an 80-page document explaining Claude's values and reasoning, which in my view is unusual transparency for the industry. It's a pretty reasonable document in comparison to the ChatGPT stuff. Which is not to like, glaze them as a company - e.g they've taken on military contracts. My point is rather to contrast them with OpenAI which I think of as not just evil but like, *uniquely* evil, even within an already ethically fraught industy. Like, obviously there's the 4o stuff in the video which just like jesus christ. Or the Scarlett Johansson voice situation where they released a voice that was like, eerily similar to hers right after she declined to participate, the fuckin.. nonprofit restructuring drama thing that triggered attorney general investigations, the safety team exodus. Or there's the lawsuits which allege OpenAI knew 4o was "dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative" but released it anyway to beat Google's Gemini to market. Them overriding concerns from expert testers who said the model "felt slightly off" because broader user metrics looked positive. That's where I would say 1) the harms of ChatGPT are the most obvious (it's been linked to murder-suicides!) and 2) where other companies, but especially Anthropic, have been doing a lot better. Claude is specifically designed to not do the thing that killed those people. It has a real-time classifier that detects when someone might be in crisis and surfaces actual mental health resources, and perhaps more importantly it's explicitly trained against sycophancy. Anthropic publishes actual numbers on this, and they've open-sourced their evaluation tools so you can check their work. When Anthropic and OpenAI did joint safety testing, they found GPT-4o and related models were "much more willing than Claude models to cooperate with simulated human misuse, often providing detailed assistance with clearly harmful requests." Both companies' models have some sycophancy problems, but the scale of consequences has been dramatically different. Again though, point here is not really to glaze Anthropic so much as to point out just how like, uniquely, absurdly evil and dangerous OpenAI has been with their product, and that, as evidenced by other companies, even within the realms of "create an LLM chatbot" it is not inevitable to create a Magic 8 Ball That Tells You To Kill Yourself.
Sarah Z
2026-01-25 03:11:36 +0000 UTCRegarding Antropic as someone who isn't familiar with it or Claude but is curious, what is the main separator between it and OpenAI / ChatGPT?
Claybreak
2026-01-25 02:18:07 +0000 UTC"Gityhub flavoured Reaganism" goes hard as a term
Josh Grey
2026-01-24 23:46:32 +0000 UTCHaving now watched the video, I think you make an incredibly good point about why this is not a video for youtube. I am reminded of the point that Doubleca5t made once, about why she stopped making When Posting Goes Wrong videos - with something like this, especially with a big enough online presence, it's very easy to become part of the story oneself. It really sucks because your research about why rationalism is incorrect about a lot of things is fascinating, but even if you left out all of the Zizian stuff, you would almost certainly be asked to comment on it. Thank you for sharing your perspective on here!
fromankyra
2026-01-24 10:34:54 +0000 UTCThis was so satisfying, I've had all of these critiques of the rat community for so, so long. I remember going to Scott Alexander's reddit community and being amazed at the outright racism being perpetuated. Also the insanity of how they treat AGI as a real existential risk and the reasoning is 'because I think it could happen'. Just so lovely to hear someone much more articulate point out all of the flaws in this community. I wish I'd had it to hand when I had to deal with my coworker explain to me why Bayesian reasoning explained why women don't like sports.
Sophie
2026-01-24 03:34:03 +0000 UTCI've been tangentially connected to rationalism for a while. Some of my friends are REALLY into it. I am pretty seceptible to the "special smart boy" pitches, but I also just do not have the "vulnerable to cults" trait that some people seem to have. I've seen people ruin their lives with this stuff.
Chris Silvia
2026-01-24 01:48:50 +0000 UTC
