This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists
They got to him before he could finish.
My falling-out with the rationalist community
51–60 of 175 posts
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#52This 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 actual…
> Dawkins never had much of a research career.
Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.
Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less. [1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le... [2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/…
Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals. h…
I’ve interacted with a number of rationalists that are just as crazy as Ziz but managed to not implode with the help of money (either lucking into it via family/crypto or a tech job). My personal hot take is that if she’d been cis a number of people would still be alive.
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#54This 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 actual…
Randi was very good at debunking other tricksters. That bootstrapped a lot of respect.
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#55Damore was clearly right though.
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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#57> 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…
> One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route.
Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right?
If you say so.
That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).
Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#59This 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.
It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them. If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously d…
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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community
#60This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists
I often have this experience with blog posts on HN. They do all the background, and once they get to the juicy bit, it ends.