121–130 of 1001 posts
This is what rationalisme entails: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
That's a different definition of rationalism from what is used here.
> “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” Give me strength. So much hubris with these guys (and they’re almost always guys). I would have assumed that a rationalist would look for truth and not correctness. Oh wait, it’s all just a smokescreen for k…
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Biologists don't try to reason everything from first principles. Actually, neither do Rationalists, but instead they cosplay at being rational.
> Biologists don't try to reason everything from first principles. What do you mean? The biologists I've had the privilege of working with absolutely do try to. Obviously some work at a higher level of abstraction than others, but I've not met any who apply any magical thinking to the actual biological investigation. In particular (at least in my milieu), I have found that the typical biologist is more likely to cons…
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The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way. Both our biology and other complex human affairs like societies and cultures evolved organically over long periods of time, responding to their environments and their competitors, building bit by bit, sometimes with an explicit goal but often without one. One can learn a lot from unicellular org…
>The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way. This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures. We wou…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41198053-neoreaction-a-b...
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A lot of "rationalists" of this kind are very poorly informed about statistical methodology, a condition they inherit from reading papers written in these pseudoscientific fields about people likewise very poorly informed. This is a pathology that has not really been addressed in the large, anywhere, really. Very few in the applied sciences who understand statistical methodology, "leave their areas" -- and many areas…
I agree, I had to read things for an ethics course in IT in uni that read more like science fiction than actual science. Anyway, my point is that it feels pretentious - very pretentious, and I'm being kind with words - to support such pseudo scientific theories and call itself rationalist. Especially when these teories can be debunked just by reading the related Wikipedia page
A lot of people who like to think of themselves as skeptical could also be categorized as contrarian -- they are skeptical of institutions, and if someone is outside an institution, that automatically gives them a certain credibility.
There are three or four logical fallacies in the mix, and if you throw in confirmation bias because what the one side says appeals to your own prior beliefs, it is really, really easy to convince yourself that you're the steely-eyed rationalist perceiving the world correctly while everyone else is deluded by their biases.
The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…
The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…