Why are there so many rationalist cults? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#431

Post by scns » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #165

saghm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah "Transubstantiation" is another technical term people might want to look at in this topic. The art piece "An Oak Tree" is a comment on these ideas. It's a glass of water. But, the artist's notes for this work insist it is an oak tree.

Interesting you bring art into the discussion. Often thought that some "artists" have a lot in common with cult leaders. My definition of art would be that is immediately understood, zero explanation needed.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#432

Post by guerrilla » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

whatevertrevor wrote: post #409

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some intellectual humility. Non-rationalists are forced to use their physical senses more often because they can't follow the chain of logic as far. This is to their advantage. Empiricism > rationalism.

That conclusion presupposes that rationality and empiricism are at odds or mutually incompatible somehow. Any rational position worth listening to, about any testable hypothesis, is hand in hand with empirical thinking.

In traditional philosophy, rationalism and empiricism are at odds; they are essentially diametrically opposed. Rationalism prioritizes a priori reasoning while empiricism prioritizes a posteriori reasoning. You can prioritize both equally but that is neither rationalism nor empiricism in the traditional terminology. The current rationalist movement has no relation to that original rationalist movement, so the words don't actually mean the same thing. In fact, the majority of participants in the current movement seem ignorant of the historical dispute and its implications, hence the misuse of the word.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#433

Post by samdoesnothing » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #231

It's amphetamine. All of these people are constantly tweaking. They're annoying people to begin with, but they're all constantly yakked up and won't stop babbling. It's really obvious, I don't know why it isn't highlighted more in all these post Ziz articles.

Yeah it's pretty obvious and not surprising. What do people expect when a bunch of socially inept nerds with weird unchallenged world views start doing uppers? lol

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#434

Post by windowshopping » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #173

dfabulich wrote: post #82

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. Specifically, rationalism spends a lot of time about priors, but a sneaky thing happens that I call the 'double update'. Bayesian updating works when you update your genuine prior believe with new evidence. No one disagrees with this, and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's di…

> Consider the pre-tipped scale. You suspect the scale reads a little low, so before weighing you tilt it slightly to "correct" for that bias. Then you pour in flour until the dial says you've hit the target weight. You’ve followed the numbers exactly, but because you started from a tipped scale, you've ended up with twice the flour the recipe called for.

I'm not following this example at all. If you've zero'd out the scale by tilting, why would adding flour until it reads 1g lead to 2g of flour?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#435

Post by freejazz » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

username332211 wrote: post #413

vehemenz wrote: post #344

I get the impression that these people desperately want to study philosophy but for some reason can't be bothered to get formal training because it would be too humbling for them. I call it "small fishbowl syndrome," but maybe there's a better term for it.

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…

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

But rationalism is?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#436

Post by mapontosevenths » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

derektank wrote: post #274

inasio wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw once a discussion that people should not have kids as it's by far the highest increase in your carbon footprint in your lifetime (>10x than going vegan, etc) be driven all the way to advocating genocide as a way of carbon footprint minimization

Setting aside the reductio ad absurdum of genocide, this is an unfortunately common viewpoint. People really need to take into account the chances their child might wind up working on science or technology which reduces global CO2 emissions or even captures CO2. This reasoning can be applied to all sorts of naive "more people bad" arguments. I can't imagine where the world would be if Norman Borlaug's parents had dec…

> this is an unfortunately common viewpoint

Not everyone believes that the purpose of life is to make more life, or that having been born onto team human automatically qualifies team human as the best team. It's not necessarily unfortunate.

I am not a rationalist, but rationally that whole "the meaning of life is human fecundity" shtick is after school special tautological nonsense, and that seems to be the assumption buried in your statement. Try defining what you mean without causing yourself some sort of recursion headache.

> their child might wind up..

They might also grow up to be a normal human being, which is far more likely.

> if Norman Borlaug's parents had decided to never have kids

Again, this would only have mattered if you consider the well being of human beings to be the greatest possible good. Some people have other definitions, or are operating on much longer timescales.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#437

Post by samdoesnothing » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

vehemenz wrote: post #344

I get the impression that these people desperately want to study philosophy but for some reason can't be bothered to get formal training because it would be too humbling for them. I call it "small fishbowl syndrome," but maybe there's a better term for it.

Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#438

Post by danaris » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #424

danaris wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm deeply and fundamentally skeptical of the recursive self-improvement/singularity hypothesis, I also don't really buy this. There are some pretty obvious ways we could improve human cognition if we had the ability to reliably edit or augment it. Better storage & recall. Lower distractibility. More working memory capacity. Hell, even extra hands for writing on more blackboards or putting up more conspiracy th…

Some of your suggestions, if you don't mind my saying, seem like only modest improvements — akin to Henry Ford's quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” To your point though, an electronic machine is a different host altogether with different strengths and weaknesses.

Well, twic's comment didn't say anything about revolutionary improvements, just "maybe we're as smart as we can be".

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#439

Post by duckmysick » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

> And yet, the rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes.

So there's six questionable (but harmless) groups and then later the article names three of them as more serious. Doesn't seem like "many" to me.

I wonder what percentage of all cults are the rationalist ones.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#440

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #432

whatevertrevor wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion presupposes that rationality and empiricism are at odds or mutually incompatible somehow. Any rational position worth listening to, about any testable hypothesis, is hand in hand with empirical thinking.

In traditional philosophy, rationalism and empiricism are at odds; they are essentially diametrically opposed. Rationalism prioritizes a priori reasoning while empiricism prioritizes a posteriori reasoning. You can prioritize both equally but that is neither rationalism nor empiricism in the traditional terminology. The current rationalist movement has no relation to that original rationalist movement, so the words d…

Yeah, Stanford has a good recap :

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

(Note also how the context is French vs British, and the French basically lost with Napoleon, so the current "rationalists" seem to be more likely to be heirs to empiricism instead.)