161–170 of 947 posts
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
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No. I have no beef with psychology or psychiatry. They're doing good work as far as I can tell. I am poking fun at people who take "rationality" and turn it into a brand name.
Why is "you can work to avoid cognitive biases" more ridiculous than "you can work to improve your mental health"?
I guess it's possible you might be doing some deep ironic thing by providing a seemingly sincere example of what I'm complaining about. If so it was over my head but in that case I withdraw "derail"!
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More people should read Sextus Empiricus as he's basically the O.G. Phyrronist skeptic and goes pretty hard on this very train of thought.
Cool. Any specific recs or places to start with him?
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Came to ask a similar question, but also has it always been like this? The difference is now these people/groups on the fringe had no visibility before the internet? It's nuts.
I personally (for better or worse) became familiar with Ayn Rand as a teenager, and I think Objectivism as a kind of extended Ayn Rand social circle and set of organizations has faced the charge of cultish-ness, and that dates back to, I want to say, the 70s and 80s at least. I know Rand wrote much earlier than that, but I think the social and organizational dynamics unfolded rather late in her career.
Very similar to my childhood religion. "We have figured everything out and everyone else is wrong for not figuring things out".
Rationalism seems like a giant castle built on sand. They just keep accruing premises without ever going backwards to see if those premises make sense. A good example of this is their notions of "information hazards".
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It’s always been like this, have you read the Bible? Or the Koran? It’s insane. Ours is just our flavor of crazy. Every generation has some. When you dig at it, there’s always a religion.
Without speaking for religions I'm not familiar with, I grew up Catholic, and one of the most important Catholic beliefs is that during Mass, the bread (i.e. "communion" wafers) and wine quite literally transform into the body and blood of Jesus, and that eating and drinking it is a necessary ritual to get into heaven[1], which was a source of controversy even back as far as the Protestant Reformation, with some sect…
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
Paraphrasing someone I don't recall - when people believe in nothing, they'll believe anything.
Thinking too hard about anything will drive you insane but I think the real issue here is that rationalists simply over-estimate both the power of rational thought and their ability to do it. If you think of people who tend to make that kind of mistake you can see how you get a lot of crazy groups. I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing a…
People find academic philosophy impenetrable and pretentious, but it has two major advantages over rationalist cargo cults. The first is diffusion of power. Social media is powered by charisma, and while it is certainly true that personality-based cults are nothing new, the internet makes it way easier to form one. Contrast that with academic philosophy. People can have their own little fiefdoms, and there is certain…
Taking academic philosophy seriously, at least as an historical phenomenon, would require being educated in the humanities, which is unpopular and low-status among Rationalists.
The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. Well, it turns out that intuition and long-lived cultural norms often have rational justifications, but individuals may not know what they are, and norms/intuitions provide useful antibodies against narcissist would-be cult leaders. Can you find the "rational" justification not to…
> The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. The game as it is _actually_ played is that you use rationalist arguments to justify your pre-existing gut intuitions and personal biases.
Thinking too hard about anything will drive you insane but I think the real issue here is that rationalists simply over-estimate both the power of rational thought and their ability to do it. If you think of people who tend to make that kind of mistake you can see how you get a lot of crazy groups. I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing a…
I don't disagree, but to steelman the case for (neo)rationalism: one of its fundamental contributions is that Bayes' theorem is extraordinarily important as a guide to reality, perhaps at the same level as the second law of thermodynamics; and that it is dramatically undervalued by larger society. I think that is all basically correct. (I call it neorationalism because it is philosophically unrelated to the more trad…
One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…
> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own. Are you certain about this?