My falling-out with the rationalist community

OK. This is dedicated enough that I don't think you're just trying to be an ass anymore, you have to actually believe in this. Unfortunately, this also means I have no actual way of convincing you otherwise, because everything I say will be simply symmetric with your interpretation at every turn or rendered so.

Consider:

You posit that the author is simply offloading his culpability to this community. I'd argue this is in direct contradiction with the potshots he constantly takes at the various motifs pertinent to the ideology behind the community, rather than just the community or its members instead.

In no particular order, and without being exhaustive:

- he demonstrates an understanding that the "less wrong" positioning is asinine and boxes in the opposition to be "more wrong"

- he demonstrates an understanding of skepticism not necessarily being merited

- he demonstrates an understanding of post hoc justifications and motivated reasoning being common failure modes, falsely presenting as rigor

- he demonstrates an understanding that belonging to such a community is seriously cringe just in general, for the very obvious reasons

He encodes these understandings into jabs, and these jabs are present in nearly every paragraph, in the appropriate tenses, specifically to highlight (via repetition) just how hilariously off base his source motivation was from the get go. His experience with the exact community and its people are just a delivery vehicle for this. I implore you to ask yourself: if he genuinely doesn't give two hot shits about reasoning right, why are these swipes in there in such amounts?

But then I can already see your answer: well clearly it is to just performatively flex his superior thinking skills! Now, how would I possibly try and falsify that? There's no way for me to do so. I mean, just ask yourself: what would the guy needed to have written so that he doesn't come off like this to you, while still telling the ~same story? You seem to have already decided what kind of person he is, and figured out an entire lore around it. Speaking of...

Consider:

> The author didn't, and still doesn't 'appreciate reason'.

This is the most hideous, blatant example for mind reading that I've seen in a good while. But then I'm also just inferring from the same text! How do I know it any better that he is, in fact, just an innocent "truth-seeker"? Nohow.

And so I'm extrapolating from myself, because the core desire speaks to me. Believe it or not, I do also happen to know what it's like to be wrong, do recognize to have been wrong before about a lot of things, and have also misjudged ideals and communities alike. I have even been in similar situations like this, where I was accused of being oh so conceited, despite actually having pretty serious issues with self confidence, and not grading my intellect particularly high at all (I still don't). But unlike you suggest, whether the issue primarily lied with me, the ideals, or the communities and their people, actually varied. Usually there was enough to go around for every part of the equation, rather than somehow conveniently always everything being my fault, as much as the human psyche very much attempted to make it feel like.

It is in this context that I'm reading this relentlessly condescending characterization. Where I know for a fact that yes, I absolutely might have fallen for this were I there at the right time and place; that yes, a lot of it is very stupid very blatantly; and that yes, the core spirit behind it can come off badly. I just also know that it is not the intention, because I lived the intention, assert otherwise as you might. Not the least because again, I certainly don't think that caring for getting things right is a particularly outlandish interest among people, after all. And not the least because I'm convinced that what you're gauging as arrogance is really just an overly candid, dorky interest, in all its awkward [0] detail.

[0] The author even evokes this by going into embarrassingly explicit detail about his plans for rhetorical domination - to me those passages ooze sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, to you, I guess you just took them straight on, in horror. I have to say, the post must be very tonally all over the place in your reading.

I did. See the very next sentences there.

Maybe you are just messing with people after all? I can definitely appreciate how something like that might come across as arrogant, when you just skip over or devalue the sentences that directly make it not so:

> But then I'm also just inferring from the same text! How do I know it any better that he is, in fact, just an innocent "truth-seeker"? Nohow.

Like this was not sarcasm. I was directly addressing the exact thing you're taking issue with, acknowledging the limitation. This is the way people communicate humility. They explicitly acknowledge that they're aware they're not the be all end all.

The passages that followed were then justifications on why I hold this belief then despite this limitation.

> Please consider that if you're having to scrape this much in the barrel

I think I hammered this in pretty well, but all the points I raised in the way of "supporting OP'd humility" consist of features that are either very heavily repeated, structural, or I find otherwise extremely blatant. So what you characterize as "scraping the barrel" is at best more a scraping of my own skin, in frustration, for how hyper persistently are you trying to contradict the obvious and extensively evidenced.

Suffice to say, please consider the exact opposite? I've been considering your view plenty. Even you suggest that the post's flow makes no good sense: so either the author is just some exceptional, miraculous buffoon like you claim they are, following in the footsteps of other wondrous specimens... or you're grossly misinterpreting the whole thing, have been repeatedly doing so with other people, and have been making some real tonedeaf remarks so far, confidently falling for the exact traps you're beating the drum to be so resistant against. I really don't think the former is likelier than the latter, and according to your logic, you shouldn't either.

This would have been kind of the exercise from the get-go. To get you to try and spend like a grand total of 5 minutes re-reading the thing under the - to you, clearly - oh so unthinkable, blasphemous assumption, that maybe you're the one who's wrong? Just genuinely assuming, for the sake of the argument, that maybe OP isn't actually the evil incarnate you think they are, much like how similarly cartoonish ideas are rarely if ever true in general (or how assuming ill-faith is typically the wrong call). And just like how I keep desperately getting this point across, entertaining a similar off chance idea, that maybe you're not being like this just to troll.