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My falling-out with the rationalist community

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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

sxp wrote: post #35

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their min…

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#42

Post by alephnerd »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41
sxp wrote: post #35

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their min…

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

[dead]

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#43

Post by ip26 »

smitty1e wrote: post #23
nradov wrote: post #8

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason. Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.

It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#44

Post by cogman10 »

zahlman wrote: post #38
cogman10 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them. How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member…

> gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?

> What gatherings?

Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1]

> What beliefs?

It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk.

> What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?

I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs and are instead simply having fun with it. Only a small 5% are actually sincere.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/les...

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#45

Post by mbgerring »

vovavili wrote: post #2

This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.

The people who sincerely believe that humans should be turned into mulch for the Computer God are “well meaning”? Say more

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#46

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ggm wrote: post #5

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing . Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argument…

I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

And Dawkins never had much of a research career.

My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#47

Post by api »

lyu07282 wrote: post #27
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Though much more destructive to society than Scientology, it's the cult that is underpinning Technofeudalism, these are people (almost) as vile as Ayn Rand.

I'd say rationalism and technofeudalism/neoreaction are adjacent more than directly linked. They seemed to develop in parallel around the same time and involved regulars on some of the same boards.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#48

Post by lyu07282 »

zahlman wrote: post #29
nradov wrote: post #8

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning . The entire point of the exercise is to establish…

You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#49

Post by pdonis »

zahlman wrote: post #29
nradov wrote: post #8

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning . The entire point of the exercise is to establish…

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true

And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#50

Post by lux-lux-lux »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41
sxp wrote: post #35

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their min…

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

Well-educated young middle class white men, and with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics. The only real outlier is the openness to HBD/scientific racism stuff.
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