My falling-out with the rationalist community • Hacker News Board

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#101

Post by s1artibartfast » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #84

zahlman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which claim exactly did I make which you are refuting? Please actually quote it. When you said: > How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings. As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature. > My point was that It's impossible to di…

> you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings. > As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature. I literally cited you an example of such a gathering. Do you refute it or just deny that it exists? > And my claim is that it's actually trivial to tell who's a true believer and who isn't, because the concept of "true believer" does not pertain to "rationality" (by constr…

you two have fundamentally different readings of the statement "95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do."

One reading is the views are eccentric within the community (e.g. roko's basilisk). The other reading is eccentric view which come out of the community but are not held.

You introduced the claim that the 95% are larping along with the 5% and sharing the same proclaimations.

If you think that, it seems fair to ask you why. Most of the weird stuff (e.g. zizian) isnt accepted by the rationaist majority. A few unusual things are, like AI X-risk.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#102

Post by pilgrim0 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

anon-3988 wrote: post #81

> Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning. So they are not rationalist then? I would hav…

It’s because of cowardice. Discussing emotions entails being exposed to some degree, but this strain of so called rationality seems rather to be about distancing oneself from the subject in question, which tends to make people feel and behave like arbiters. One could argue that the poets are the real rationalists, at least the good ones. Because there’s no distancing from the truth, just raw and pure content, which is radically different than second order, cheap, hopelessly biased analysis.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#103

Post by tzs » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

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…

On those survey results several items show a 5 item bar chart with the bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 showing the counts and percentages of respondents who chose 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

For example, "Do you prefer modern or older architecture?" shows 20% chose 1, 34.6% chose 2, 25.6% chose 3, 15% chose 4, and 4.8% chose 5.

WTF does this mean? I don'e see anything that says what those labels mean. I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y but in what order?

But some aren't comparisons. One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#104

Post by pilgrim0 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #21

Every community has its biases, and everywhere there's a tendency for complex factors to combine and simplify into attractive patterns. In the end, even I can't escape bias. And when I realize how ignorant I am, I feel like I have no choice but to live face to face with how pathetic I am. Even if I'm aware of my bounded rationality and ignorance, there are still moments when I fail to recognize even that ignorance. I…

The path of virtue requires we recognize and appreciate the grace that lies in being humbled by our own stupidity.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#105

Post by justonepost2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

g-b-r wrote: post #97

justonepost2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m

Oh, they're working to instate a dictatorship, they're not that bad...

For the record, I’m not saying this particular loser on twitter will ever have the power to institute a dictatorship.

But it is insane to say that EA and rationalism* are not about believing you are superior and more rational than your peers, or that most EA/rats don’t make an identity out of it (look at any of their online presences). Anthropic literally exists to funnel money and influence to its EA/rat cofounders and early investors, who sincerely believe that they and they alone are smart and rational enough to shepherd our society through its “technological adolescence”. I wish people who agree with this would at least be honest about it.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#106

Post by smitty1e » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:00 AM UTC

bigbadfeline wrote: post #87

ip26 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results. One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept…

A third alternative, to quote Dirty Harry, is "A man's got to know his limitations." https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#107

Post by ianmarcinkowski » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #83

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.

I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment. Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new ort…

La dee da! I have convinced myself to donate a kidney to someone I don't know, and also gain clout!

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#108

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:48 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #83

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.

I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment. Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new ort…

[deleted]

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#109

Post by s1artibartfast » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #92

s1artibartfast wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure what your criticism is directed at. In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past. We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism. Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.

> We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism. We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of causal mechanisms. But we can't prove by logical argument based on "fundamental axioms of reasoning" that these things are "true".

I see. I agree that there are major limitations to purely logical arguments.

This is why unlike the rationists of the 17th century, modern "rationalists" predominately focus on empiricism (ironic i know). They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. This has the knock on effect of interest in prediction markets.

Is your impression otherwise?

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#110

Post by jancsika » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 3:17 AM UTC

gwd wrote: post #62

novia wrote: post #6

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 did. The entire section starting with "Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else" talks about the failure of the rationalist community to be any better than any other group. Then this describes the actual break: > By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was a…

> Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?

If a social creature plays chess in a club where everyone else cosplays, the first thing that creature will do is find a better group of players to raise the challenge. Most serious chess players end up doing that sooner or later.

Rationalists are also social creatures, so that principle remains the same. To pretend that a group of cosplayers wouldn't affect a rationalist's ability to be effective is, ironically, irrational.

Also, there can become serious negative implications to terminology at the critical mass of cosplay the author implies in the article. I have neighbors who are contractors and went in on a house together. They split up time amongst their families, using it as an investment and vacation house. For very good reasons they never refer to what they are doing as "time sharing." :)