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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Really, I was just responding to the prior. They drove the pseudo-rationalist line. I do think there is a toxic culture in rationalism, but I tend to blame it on neoliberal economic reductionism, or libertarianism. I don't think rationalism per se is at the root of it, pseudo-rationalism, what would that even be? purported rationalism but actually.. over-arching asocialism? self interest? Anyway, I saw religiosity as the counter-case to rationalism.

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There's more than one counter-case to rationalism. Atheists, liberals, Democrats, progressives can all be irrational or pseudo-rational.

What would pseudo-rationalism even be? Purported rationalism, yes, but the rationalism would be just a smokescreen for positions that are not rationally derived and therefore not addressable by means of rational argument.

I don't understand why you think asocialism or self-interest is the opposite of rationalism. I think that's on an orthogonal axis.

Pseudo-rationalism is the construction of elaborate rationalizations for your biases and hot-takes while convincing yourself that the considered disagreement of others means you are fundamentally more intelligent and adept in the ways of reasoning.

Bonus points for obfuscating your positions with in-group jargon and mathematical terminology that you don't actually understand. Nattering on about 'Bayesian priors' won't make you any more effective at reasoning than coconut headphones will help land airplanes, but it might keep people from challenging your ideas. If it does so because they've written you off as a fool or because you've successfully snowed them, you'll never know.

"What would pseudo-rationalism even be? Purported rationalism, yes, but the rationalism would be just a smokescreen for positions that are not rationally derived and therefore not addressable by means of rational argument."

The fundamental question of philosophy: how do you tell a rationally derived belief from an irrationally derived belief?

> how do you tell a rationally derived belief from an irrationally derived belief?

The former, I could change, given enough data.

The latter, I am willing to die for (or rather, attack other people for). However, I could change it after hanging out with different people for long time.

I guess because I see secular humanism as being rooted in a rationalist outlook, and the a-social claimed rationality of the Ayn Rand rugged individualists just leaves me cold, as does most libertarian rejections of society and social equity, collectivism to me is the highest form of rationalism.

Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone. This was also rationalized. Rugged individualism is much less a-social from that perspective.

>Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone.

So? The western states killed and enslaved just as many under various names (from christianity and manifest destiny, to democracy and free trade and "the free world").

What happened in the name of an idea doesn't mean the idea is bad or that what happened is an inevitable part of the idea.

I note that your rejection of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it "leaves you cold", rather than a rational refutation of it.

Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there. (Well, maybe. I suspect that at least to some degree, she already had her position, and derived her axioms from there, then argued for her position from her axioms.) So I attack her position by saying that in her third axiom, she mis-defines consciousness, and the rest of her errors follow from her flawed starting position. That's rational. "It leaves me cold" is not a rational response. (It may be an indication that you feel there's something wrong with the position, even if you can't define it or prove it, and that's fine. But it's not a rational response.)

One may argue that the deliberate communicative act of expressively sharing feelings by means of articulated language may very well be a rational response by itself, as long as it's driven by a thoughtful enough intention. Even if at the same time it's fully void of rationalist value.

(Sorry if it comes across overly pedantic and twisted: non-native speaker, not enough sleep, words hard.)

Why do you attack her position? Because you fundamentally, a priori, believe her third axiom is wrong, or because the collection of axioms and conclusions "leaves you cold" and the third axiom is a key place you find to disagree with her reasoning?

Because I didn't think her conclusions were right, and because her system is laid out logically enough that I could trace through and find out where I thought it went wrong.

>Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there.

There's no way to arrive "logically" at value judgements.

You can just use logic as a klutch to support your pre-determined positions (and, of course, which is totally rational as a practice, to spread, support and enforce them).

Right, there's a difference between rationalizing and being rational.

http://www.andrej.com/objectivism/ is a beautiful work from an expert in rational thinking.

Not so sure about the actual rationality of this. E.g.:

"Things are what they are. There is only one reality, namely the way things are."

That's only true for the least interesting things: objects and their arrangements in space-time.

On that, the huge majority (besides maybe crazy people) agrees anyway, when they see them, or when they're given evidence of them (e.g. a photo of a laptop on a desk. 99.999% of the people will agree there's a laptop on a desk there).

For anything else, politics, values, claims and the veracity of claims, morality, motives, aesthetics, goals, etc., there is no single way things are, there are ways people perceive them, and there are different interets, worldviews, and ways of interpreting them.

What is the "reality" or "non-reality" of "I'm willing to die for my country"? Or of "I find it OK to make money stealing"? Or "You should treat people well even if you are not forced to|?

David Hume is an empiricist. Noam Chomsky is more of rationalist.

LessWrong-rationalism is just crackpottery.

This brings to mind a review of Stephen Hicks “Explaining Postmodernism”. In the book he contrasts postmodernism with objectivism: postmodernists are irrational while objectivists are rational. And once you look long enough at the comparison tables you realize that there is no philosophy there; it’s just “bad thing” v.s. “good thing”.

Kind of like “rationalism”, that obvious good thing. Who wouldn’t want to be rational? What’s our philosophy? Uh, to be rational? To be for good things and against bad things?

Hence your indignation at putting pseudo in front of that word: how could one possibly object to something called rationalism? Hello, it’s in the name—rationalism! It’s about being rational. What more do you want, Jack?

“Per se”...

And nice touch with the but-religion-though. That was a zinger.

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