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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?
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." :)
Leave the audience wanting more, I guess?
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).
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.
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.
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.
In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.
We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.
Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.
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.
Yudkowsky wrote them from 2006-2009, so he would have been in his late 20s.
> because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate
The Sequences are about pure reasoning, not about results from "studies". They are very much about how to analyze studies and about the fact that you should care whether they replicate.
In fact, I can't even recall any such "studies referenced".
If you say so.
That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).
> 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.
No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.
Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.
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.
Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.
During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results.
One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept what you're told to accept".
The lack of truth isn't due to it being hard or unachievable, there's enough of it to solve all major problems, it's not being pursued because of conflicts of interest.
"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...
I'm not really sure that "openness to racism" is an outlier in a population of a bunch of straight white men.
The entire point is that true statements are true, and false statements are false, regardless of who does or doesn't utter them.
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?
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.
"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".
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)
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.
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.
and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...
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.
one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.
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.
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.
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.
Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.
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.
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.
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
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
you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example
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.
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.
I know he's EA, but let's not pretend that EA is so distinct from the rationalist community.
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.
How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them?
How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member of the 5% (and if those percentages are accurate).
You can observe the same dynamic in any church. Everyone in the congregation will have different levels of belief, but when it comes to sharing a testimony you'll be hard pressed to distinguish between who the true believers are and who's just "faking it until you make it".
(Except that they don't claim them to be "their own beliefs" but instead call them "priors".)
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.
[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...
[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...
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".
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w