Why are there so many rationalist cults?

> If you do a million dollars worth of damage to the world and earn 100k (or a billion dollars worth of damage to earn a million dollars), even if you spend all of the money you earned on making the world a better place, you arent even going to fix 10% of the damage you caused (and thats ignoring the fact that its usually easier/cheaper to break things than to fix them).

You kinda summed up a lot of the world post industrial revolution there, at least as far as stuff like toxic waste (Superfund, anyone?) and stuff like climate change, I mean for goodness sake let's just think about TEL and how they knew Ethanol could work but it just wasn't 'patentable'. [0] Or the "We don't even know the dollar amount because we don't have a workable solution" problem of PFAS.

[0] - I still find it shameful that a university is named after the man who enabled this to happen.

The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.

It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.

Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.

Is it really that surprising that a group of humans who think they have some special understanding of reality compared to others tend to separate and isolate themselves until they fall into an unguided self-reinforcing cycle?

I'd have thought that would be obvious since it's the history of many religions (which seem to just be cults that survived the bottleneck effect to grow until they reached a sustainable population).

In other words, humans are wired for tribalism, so don't be surprised when they start forming tribes...

> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.

I've been there myself.

> And without the steadying influence of some kind of external goal you either achieve or don’t achieve, your beliefs can get arbitrarily disconnected from reality — which is very dangerous if you’re going to act on them.

I think this and the entire previous two paragraphs preceding it are excellent arguments for philosophical pragmatism and empiricism. It's strange to me that the community would not have already converged on that after all their obsessions with decision theory.

> The Zizians and researchers at Leverage Research both felt like heroes, like some of the most important people who had ever lived. Of course, these groups couldn’t conjure up a literal Dark Lord to fight. But they could imbue everything with a profound sense of meaning. All the minor details of their lives felt like they had the fate of humanity or all sentient life as the stakes. Even the guilt and martyrdom could be perversely appealing: you could know that you’re the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for your beliefs.

This helps me understand what people mean by "meaning". A sense that their life and actions actually matter. I've always struggled to understand this issue but this helps make it concrete, the kind of thing people must be looking for.

> One of my interviewees speculated that rationalists aren’t actually any more dysfunctional than anywhere else; we’re just more interestingly dysfunctional.

"We're"? The author is a rationalist too? That would definitely explain why this article is so damned long. Why are rationalists not able to write less? It sounds like a joke but this is seriously a thing. [EDIT: Various people further down in the comments are saying it's amphetamines and yes, I should have known that from my own experience. That's exactly what it is.]

> Consider talking about “ethical injunctions:” things you shouldn’t do even if you have a really good argument that you should do them. (Like murder.)

This kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Also, this is nowhere justified in the article, just added on as the very last sentence.

> to me, it seems like this is a cargo-cultish transposition of the act of finding _fallacies in arguments_ into the domain of finding _faults in persons_.

Well put, thanks!