Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about…
Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…
Not only that, but this is exactly the kind of scenario where we should be giving those signals the most weight: The individual estimating whether to join up with a tribe. (As opposed to, say, bad feelings about doing calculus.)
Not only does it involve humans-predicting-humans (where we have a rather privileged set of tools) but there have been millions of years of selective pressure to be decent at it.