My falling-out with the rationalist community

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist

by surprisetalk • 2 days ago

90 147 2 days ago

lcamtuf.substack.com

vovavili6• 2 days ago

This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.

cogman106• 2 days ago

I think the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths which can lead to truly unhinged and irrational beliefs and actions (see: the Zizians).

That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evidence for why those priors should be accepted.

FeepingCreature3• 2 days ago

Consider a community filled with 100 people; 95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do. Those 5 will inevitably become the public face of the community when they make the news. However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them.

s1artibartfast8• 2 days ago

the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths

I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data.

If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.

twic3• 2 days ago

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/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...

FeepingCreature3• 2 days ago

Raising existential risk from AI in the same sentence as "rationality demands we murder our landlord" is a bit weird a grouping.

krapp• 2 days ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w

vovavili6• 2 days ago

There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.

It would be highly surprising if an open-access online community with the kind of slogans that might be particularly appealing to somewhat spectrumy individuals did not occasionally attract some eccentrics. The point I am trying to make here is that these are pretty fringe offshots and are far from the representative views of the community as a whole. Appeals to reason don't make any community immune to human nature. After all, their main place of gathering is named "less wrong", not "correct".

zahlman22• 2 days ago

Asking "why are there so many rationalist cults?" (as the URL does) in this context is kind of like asking "why are there so many mathematical cranks?", and then holding forth that this somehow demonstrates a fundamental problem with mathematics.

joegibbs2• 2 days ago

The problem is the whole idea of working from first principles to try to discover the actual truth, rather than just going along with other ideas that other people have created through history. The benefit of going along with other peoples' ideas is that they've been tested out for hundreds or thousands of years and been found to not be that destructive.

If you start reasoning from first principles you can very easily make an incorrect assumption somewhere down the line that snowballs until you're talking about shrimp welfare, or making decisions based on the potential sextillion humans that exist in 1,000,000 AD, or planning to convert the entire universe into unthinking organic matter that can only experience bliss.

hollerith• 2 days ago

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 too busy to devote a lot of time to reading long intellectual texts) and low conscientiousness makes violence and other transgressive behavior more likely.

g-b-r10• 2 days ago

It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us.

That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them.

If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously dangerous cult.

zahlman22• 2 days ago

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.

mbgerring• 2 days ago

The people who sincerely believe that humans should be turned into mulch for the Computer God are “well meaning”? Say more

nialv73• 2 days ago

online nerds

you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example

twic3• 2 days ago

Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims.

Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.

stickfigure• 2 days ago

OP's take seems to be unfairly critical. I wasn't at the MIT or Georgia Tech lectures (Gene Ray spoke once at each) but it sounds like the audience was pretty respectful, all things considered. He was given uninterrupted time to explain his ideas, then question and answer. No shouting.

Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant.

A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way."

Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 1 day ago

I'm not even sure it was the rationalists, just ordinary MIT/Georgia Tech students. But my understanding (I wasn't there obviously) is like you say that Gene Ray was not invited to speak so he could be easily humiliated by people larping the superior intellects, but instead treated with curiosity and respect even if it was clear like you say that his ideas were a little bit mad. Tbh I think people were just fascinated to find someone with such outlandish ideas who was so entirely caught up with their own creation.

So I think the author is maybe overreacting in that one. The rest, what he says about "rationalists" going after flat earthers and intelligent designers etc with a list of logical fallacies at hand, for sport, that's very true.

zahlman22• 1 day ago

The original timecube.com died (domain registration expiration) in 2015 (shortly after its creator) and timecube.net is a reboot from 2023 (and I can find nothing tying it to the estate or anything like that).

twic3• 1 day ago

See? Immortality through memes!

ggm2• 2 days ago

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)

TheOtherHobbes• 2 days ago

I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

And Dawkins never had much of a research career.

My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.

pdonis5• 2 days ago

Dawkins never had much of a research career.

Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.

Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.

ggm2• 2 days ago

Randi was very good at debunking other tricksters. That bootstrapped a lot of respect.

JuniperMesos• 1 day ago

I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

Engaging with someone's ideas isn't the same thing as throwing yourself behind that person. There are a number of public writers associated with rationalism (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander probably being the most famous), but the social scene isn't defined by following them as leaders or thinking their ideas are correct.

My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

The skeptics didn't think the paranormal was an easy target they were punching down at, they thought it was a corrosive, poltically-powerful, and immoral force in US poltics that was leading towards bad ends. Also what you call the paranormal they call "institutional Christianity in US poltics" - even that choice of words has poltical valence.

There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

I think this is you personally simply having a somewhat different set of poltical concerns than the skeptics did (in part because time has passed since their heyday, and the landscape of American poltics has shifted some), and wanting them to care about exactly what you are about and not about what they cared about, without wanting to claim that their object-level concerns were necessarily wrong.

nialv73• 2 days ago

Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...

novia• 2 days ago

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

actsasbuffoon• 2 days ago

Yeah, that felt abrupt.

Leave the audience wanting more, I guess?

kenforthewin• 2 days ago

It's a shame because I think there a lot of valid, thoughtful critiques one could level at the Rat/EA community; but this was not that.

danielhaven• 2 days ago

They got to him before he could finish.

stevage• 2 days ago

I often have this experience with blog posts on HN. They do all the background, and once they get to the juicy bit, it ends.

gwd2• 2 days ago

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 already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists. I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft.

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." The implication being that after this they no longer considered themselves a rationalist, nor engaged in its form of arguing.

ETA: FWIW, I mean... hard things are hard? It's the normal state of the world that people think they've done the hard thing but are actually just finding excuses to do what they want. People like J.D. Vance decide to be a Catholic, but turns out Jesus' actual teachings are so counter-intuitive that he still doesn't understand them and does them badly. Actually being rational is a difficult, mostly solo activity.

Quitting rationalism (or Christianity, or ...) because most of the people around you are just cosplaying is like quitting chess because most of the people around you are just playing around and never get past 1200 ELO. Or like quitting weightlifting because most people around you talk about reps and whatever but never actually push themselves enough to get past their current plateau. Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?

jancsika• 2 days ago

Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?

If a social creature plays chess in a club where everyone else cosplays, the first thing that creature will do is find a better group of players to raise the challenge. Most serious chess players end up doing that sooner or later.

Rationalists are also social creatures, so that principle remains the same. To pretend that a group of cosplayers wouldn't affect a rationalist's ability to be effective is, ironically, irrational.

Also, there can become serious negative implications to terminology at the critical mass of cosplay the author implies in the article. I have neighbors who are contractors and went in on a house together. They split up time amongst their families, using it as an investment and vacation house. For very good reasons they never refer to what they are doing as "time sharing." :)

rsynnott4• 1 day ago

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.

zahlman22• 2 days ago

It comes across to me that there's a lot of culture warring in it that's irrelevant to the task of actually figuring out what's true. Bringing up Damore and "sealioning" within a few paragraphs is more than enough to establish for me that this is not about trying to have any kind of constructive discussion.

Aside from that, it's curious how I've been interested in these ideas (and following SSC) for like a decade and this is the first I've heard of the castle. But I do hear about the Against Malaria Foundation constantly from that direction, and I'm pretty sure they've received more than 15 million from self-styled "aspiring rationalists" and "effective altruists" (although these really aren't meant as identity labels and you're doing it wrong if you think of yourself that way; pg's "Keep your identity small" represents solid rationalist thinking).

oh_my_goodness• 2 days ago

Yes. It's almost as if the author felt that long, long, long chains of explanations might be somehow undesirable.

rsynnott4• 1 day ago

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.

nradov2• 2 days ago

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.

popalchemist• 2 days ago

Indeed, it is literally an ideology.

smitty1e2• 2 days ago

It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason.

Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.

ip26• 2 days ago

It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.

alephnerd• 2 days ago

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 there might have been an overrepresentation of neurodivergence in the community as well, and for some rationalism's simple precepts simply worked - though arguably you can integrate axiomatic thinking and formal logic with traditional religion as well (eg. Nicomachean Ethics or Ashtadhyay).

I am a massive supporter for data-driven decision making (heck, much of my undergrad was touching this kind of stuff), but mental models are meant to be tools not a crutch, and overindexing on them causes one to lose sight of the forest when amongst trees.

I'd also refute the notion on HN that the movers and shakers of the industry are overrepresented in the community - I actually found the rationalist community to be somewhat marginal in the industry as a whole but overrepresented among a specific type of chronically online individual. Indoor climbing, pickleball, and creative arts (eg. Pottery) are much more representative.

penguin_booze• 1 day ago

couple rationalist events

Was this run by match.com?

zahlman22• 2 days ago

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it.

Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning.

The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.

lyu072822• 2 days ago

You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".

pdonis5• 2 days ago

The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true

And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.

jml7c5• 2 days ago

This is a label applied from outside

I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".

There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.

perching_aix6• 2 days ago

We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context. It is not just "facts and logic", and it is most certainly not universal, since universal optimality doesn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith

Taken at face value, that'd mean bridging the analog hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole), which is fundamentally impossible. Logic proves consistency, not truth, despite the many related terminologies suggesting otherwise. This is further skipping over how people segment the world different, even relative to themselves over time, which thus forms a coordination problem.

It reminds me to how HTTP is stateless. Yeah, it's stateless - all the state keeping has simply been laundered a layer above. It may sound tantalizing to position certain arguments as simply rational (i.e. correct/optimal), but all that ultimately does is sidestep the actual coordination part, which never really went away. There is still an underlying segmentation model being asserted, it is just now coated in self-righteousness, an illusion of rigor, drawing up a false dichotomy of "either you segment the world like we do, and then you're correct, or you're incorrect, and your segmentation is too".

See this rhetorical landmine in action in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986530

Even if I go out of my way and interpret the word such that it merely means "acting on reason" (as opposed to some sort of nonreason), that doesn't mean much for the same reasons. You can have any arbitrary reason to act or think any particular way; possessing an explainable rationale on its own, even if internally coherent, is not necessarily one way or another.

mrandish• 2 days ago

I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment.

Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new orthodoxy in rigidly dogmatic ways, eventually becoming 'a movement' with schisms, in-group/out-group policing, deference to influential members and ostracism for heterodox views.

ianmarcinkowski• 2 days ago

La dee da! I have convinced myself to donate a kidney to someone I don't know, and also gain clout!

Planktonne3• 2 days ago

I have very little patience with the regular appearance of articles that follow the below flow.

1. I believe I'm very smart

2. I fell down a rabbit hole into a subculture filled with people who also think they are smart

3. Eventually I realised that they weren't that smart, and were actually most just a fad + spite (+ generally bigotry)

4. I worked this out because I'm very smart, and now I'm here to tell you, people who never fell for it, that that subculture isn't all it claims to be

5. Wow

It never, ever comes with the realisation that maybe the problem is the initial flawed belief and the smugness inherent in it.

cogman106• 2 days ago

Falling for a cult is something that can happen to almost anyone. I think it's somewhat healthy for one to recognize they were in a cult and to share the experience of realizing that and getting out. It may come off as smug, but it's also a pretty vulnerable thing to do as you are admitting "I was duped".

The main smugness one can have is thinking they are immune to falling for a cult. Lot's of people do for lots of reasons. It's particularly likely when someone is in a vulnerable position in life (death, depression, major life change). Sometimes people are simply born into the cults and realize later that everything their family and community believes is a lie. Regardless, cults are pretty good at finding and "loving" people into the cult.

All this is to say that everyone should take a moment to question their core beliefs. Why do I believe this? Could I be wrong? How would I know I'm wrong? Questions I know I wish I asked and explored earlier in life. The honest answers, though, can be devastating if this part of your identity or family identity.

Planktonne3• 2 days ago

I fully agree with everything you've said, but crucially, I don't think this article, or the others like it, are actually recognising their own vulnerability.

The framing isn't 'I fell for this and I was wrong', but 'I am the first one f all of you to see the truth'; there's no humility, no recognition, just the exact same self-delusion, which means they'll fall into the next pit head-first as well.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 1 day ago

No I think that's unfair to the author. This is how they close the article:

> I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft.

That's very much a sign of a realisation that the problem was their "initial flawed belief", as I read it.

perching_aix6• 13 hours ago

I struggle to suspend disbelief that this is not just some ill-faith mockery.

The guy really quite explicitly spells out a journey of growing in intellectual humility. The writing is very, very blatantly in the genre of self-growth, which is why you see this structure so often. That he wanted to gravitate towards those whom he found smart (implying he did not consider himself that smart at the start, very directly contradicting what you say), participated, eventually discovered that there's smoke to the fire, then stopped participating, learning lessons along the way and now passing them on to the dear reader that much wiser.

How you walked away from this with the conclusions you did genuinely escapes me, and apparently this is not even your first time either then. Never stopped to reconsider? Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you? Do you maybe instinctively read it as a comparison, as if it was meant to suggest that other people (i.e. you) thus somehow do not appreciate reason? I have a meme for you if so: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...

Or are you at one of these stages yourself, and we can expect a blogpost from you in the future too?

Planktonne3• 10 minutes ago

Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you?

I'm going to respond to just this bit of your comment, if you don't mind, because I think this is the core of both your and the author's misconception, with everything else flowing from that.

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

They joined a cult of superiority and in-fighting that labelled itself as appreciating reason. Now they're out of the cult, but they think the issue is not with themselves, but with the others who did appreciating reason wrong. The fundamental flaw that they still haven't examined is that they still view themselves as a truth-seeker who was misled, not someone who made the wrong choices.

I've been wrong a lot, about many things, and there's always the easy temptation of reacting to that by treating it as just bad luck, believing that I did everything right but circumstances conspired against me. It's an easy option, but it's false, and it means you get stuck in the same pattern again.

Humility comes from recognising the ultimate, rather than proximal issue. Not 'I am still smart but the others were wrong and I got muddled' but 'maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was'. The article focuses on the movement as having the same flaws as everything else--it wasn't the superior home they were seeking--but doesn't consider the two most important elements required for growth here:

- Their own flaws and culpability

- The flaws inherent to the movement that aren't shared by society

The take away is 'the rationalist movement is no better than other groups, but I am' rather than 'both I and the rationalist movement have significant flaws that are not shared by everyone'.

throwawayffffas• 2 days ago

Of course, as a rational person, you wanted to side with the scientists; if nothing else, it seemed like the winning move.

The rational person does not engage with the argument. Because there is nothing to be gained from the argument.

The winning move is not to play.

jdw64• 2 days ago

Every community has its biases, and everywhere there's a tendency for complex factors to combine and simplify into attractive patterns.

In the end, even I can't escape bias. And when I realize how ignorant I am, I feel like I have no choice but to live face to face with how pathetic I am.

Even if I'm aware of my bounded rationality and ignorance, there are still moments when I fail to recognize even that ignorance. I feel like I just have to live with the awareness of how contradictory a being I am

pilgrim02• 2 days ago

The path of virtue requires we recognize and appreciate the grace that lies in being humbled by our own stupidity.

oliculipolicula• 2 days ago

And this is why the difficulty of convincing yourself of who downvoted you was a terrible idea of tptacek's ;)

I'll admit I won't be entirely able to stick to the virtue of only wanting to find out which of downvoters were justified whenever the situation pops up

Nowadays I'll only say that idea was bad BC it's hard (emotionally, at least) to reverse once implemented

greygoo222• 2 days ago

This is a pretty low-quality article that didn't give me the impression the author spent any time in the "rationalist community." It's just a list of the few mainstream controversies.

g-b-r10• 2 days ago

If you say so. I'm sure you're impartial about the matter.

ultrablack• 2 days ago

Damore was clearly right though.

sxp• 2 days ago

For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked.

"Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...

What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.

One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...

pavel_lishin• 2 days ago

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

lux-lux-lux2• 2 days ago

Well-educated young middle class white men, and with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics. The only real outlier is the openness to HBD/scientific racism stuff.

zahlman22• 2 days ago

And?

The entire point is that true statements are true, and false statements are false, regardless of who does or doesn't utter them.

zahlman22• 1 day ago

> Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1]
That graph looks incredibly un-diverse.

Which of age, childlessness, white skin, being male or US citizenship is an "ideology"?

xhevahir• 2 days ago

One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route.

Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.

zahlman22• 2 days ago

Because, as the incident with Damore amply demonstrated, trying to use common language to describe these concepts leads to enormous misunderstandings at best. (And sometimes people go out of their way to misinterpret you anyway.)

tzs• 2 days ago

On those survey results several items show a 5 item bar chart with the bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 showing the counts and percentages of respondents who chose 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

For example, "Do you prefer modern or older architecture?" shows 20% chose 1, 34.6% chose 2, 25.6% chose 3, 15% chose 4, and 4.8% chose 5.

WTF does this mean? I don'e see anything that says what those labels mean. I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y but in what order?

But some aren't comparisons. One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?

zahlman22• 1 day ago

I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y

Yes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale

but in what order? ... One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?

These things become clear by cross-referencing with the actual survey (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZLCk8_L64hen93A2g...).

anon-3988• 2 days ago

Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.

So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion.

If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas.

If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion.

All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut.

I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.

nialv73• 2 days ago

So they are not rationalist then?

one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.

pilgrim02• 2 days ago

It’s because of cowardice. Discussing emotions entails being exposed to some degree, but this strain of so called rationality seems rather to be about distancing oneself from the subject in question, which tends to make people feel and behave like arbiters. One could argue that the poets are the real rationalists, at least the good ones. Because there’s no distancing from the truth, just raw and pure content, which is radically different than second order, cheap, hopelessly biased analysis.

henryaj2• 2 days ago

This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion

This is not true of rationalists! "Straw Vulcan" as a failure mode was talked about fifteen years ago - https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan

bifrost• 2 days ago

Oh man I love this:

"Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality."

So many "things" where its "we're the good guys club and if you're not in our club you're the bad guy".

Tomte• 2 days ago

Like "Non-violent communication"

henryaj2• 2 days ago

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 example (EA not rat, but EA is the policy arm of rationalism after all) expressly warn against this. Feels like a strawman.

H8crilA• 1 day ago

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.

jhanschoo• 2 days ago

Admittedly I'm quite removed from the Bay Area rationalists, but I get the perception that unlike with many other ideological communities, you could always lay out your countervailing opinion with evidence. You could disagree on many things and still be in conversation with the community. Stuff including early stuff like the Sequences are subject to criticism and reevaluation. If my perception is correct, then imo a community that is (in parts) in critical conversation with itself seems more grounded to me than the usual strongly ideological and religious communities.

rsynnott4• 1 day ago

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...)

My falling-out with the rationalist community

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