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

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#121

Post by vovavili » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #75

twic wrote: post #12

Earlier 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/…

>appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense I think it is more that teenagers and very young adults and people high in the trait of "openness to new experiences" are more susceptible to nonsense and more attracted to new intellectual movements, of which the rationalist community is one. Also, I expect a rationalist to be lower in conscientiousness than average (because the conscientious people are t…

I guess people who are high in both openness and conscientiousness and who like to read long texts prefer to read them through books over online forums and social media.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#122

Post by H8crilA » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

henryaj wrote: post #118

Damore wasn't a rationalist but his memo was at least somewhat reasonable, and didn't merit him being cancelled. > From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn Do people do this in practice? 80K for exam…

Yes, those that work in intelligence, sort of. The depth and character of application of this rule depends on a particular country. For example nearly all of them would justify a few murders to keep trade routes open.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#123

Post by vovavili » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #37

twic wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

The author here clearly is extremely superficially familiar with the writings of rationalist people and views them from a preconceived standpoint. Comparing beliefs of Yudkowsky to dianetics is nothing short of misguided, whether you like him or not. This is a textbook study of motivated reasoning.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#124

Post by rsynnott » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

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

Huh, yeah. After:

> I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex / murder cult that originated from the same community.

I was expecting to hear about some latest 'rationalist' authority. But it's unclear what actually lead to the breaking point. I'd actually wonder if they hit publish too early.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#125

Post by rsynnott » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:14 PM 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…

> In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more."

That would make sense, except for the first paragraph mentioning that the Bankman-Fried thing and the Zizian murder thing didn't prompt them to write it. Both were long _after_ the Damore thing. The strong implication of the first paragraph was that there was some _new_ breaking point, but that's quite an old one.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#126

Post by rsynnott » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

The fascinating thing to me about rationalism is that it has its routes in scepticism, and particularly atheistic scepticism, and yet it seems to have evolved into, essentially, the 21st century's first notable religion.

(Though in a way that feels a little derivative; I suspect that many of the principals just took _Hyperion_ _way_ too seriously, tbh...)

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#127

Post by eudamoniac » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

lyu07282 wrote: post #86

zahlman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

There is nothing I could possibly say to convince you otherwise, in the same EXACT way I couldn't convince a scientologist that their thetan levels are nonsense. It was never the argument that conditional probability or other mathematics is wrong, nobody is ever arguing that, but that is all you disciples ever argue against. You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people believing to "reason" yourselves to some h…

I don't know who the Rationalists are, but if I imagine them as some kind of misguided Vulcan logicians, I cannot understand what argument you and others are trying to make here. Do you have any concrete examples of a rationalist believing nonsense dogmatically?

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#128

Post by pdonis » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #109

pdonis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth.

Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in replacement for your brain. "Rationalists" often seem to talk as though they think it is--just follow this recipe and your thinking will automatically give the right answer. And anyone who tries to talk about limitations of this is obviously a crackpot.

> Is your impression otherwise?

Not with respect to obsession with Bayesian reasoning, no. But I seem to have a different take on that than you do. See above.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#129

Post by eudamoniac » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

g-b-r wrote: post #114

zahlman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way. > That, along with constantly calling yourself rational This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.

Ok, less wrong every day; we have some rationalists here, whether you think yourself as rational or not let's get an idea of how rational you actually are: do you agree with the views of @tenobrus mentioned below ( https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850 ), specifically that humanity should be placed under a dictatorship? I know he's EA, but let's not pretend that EA is so distinct from the rationalis…

I'm not a rationalist and I don't know who these people are. As far as I can tell they're a bunch of online weirdos who don't matter. But as for that statement, "humanity will be far far better off if they're subjected to the values of effective altruists," that depends on the values in question, which haven't been explained in this thread. But there is definitely a set of values that exists that humanity would be better off subjected to than pure democracy. This is different from supporting an undefined alignment dictatorship in the abstract.

Everyone implicitly believes the above when they believe the concept of a "backwards society" can even exist, or when they think their own society would be better if their lost candidate had power. In both cases you think that there exist a set of values that are better to live under than what the democratic process resulted in.

I think actually most people believe this about their own values. I could find you infinite posts online that say "humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#130

Post by penguin_booze » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #24

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.

Very much this. I've been to a couple rationalist events in the Bay during peak rationalism (originally with an open mind but eventually resorted to gawking after people couldn't handle "but why..." style questions and prodding which is the norm in my line of work and past academic experience) and it was truly weird seeing supposedly well educated people fall for such obvious cult-like traps. In hindsight, I guess th…

> couple rationalist events

Was this run by match.com?