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Comment by airza | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda funny that in his rush to explain why the NYT article is a hit piece, the author has brought his own ideological froth to the forefront. I found a lot of Scott's articles about medicine and psychology to be great, and some of his philosophical musings to be interesting as well. (something that the NYY piece mentions in the first paragraph) But all of the rationalists I have met in life were personally odious, somehow taking that ideology to the logical conclusion that libertarianism was not only the correct way to structure society, but also that disagreeing with it was a moral or intellectual failing. Which, sure, is something that a lot of ideologues would say... but the fact that they confidently claimed to have derived that ideology from first principles made any kind of discussion impossible. :(

(I actually agree with Scott's request to remain anonymous though. I guess politics are complex.)

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> But all of the rationalists I have met in life were personally odious

I think it is more likely that you mean this about people who build their identity around rationalism. Most people with a single dominant interest are tedious in one way or another.

That's a fair statement :)

Really? I feel like having an opinion based on reasoning from first principles should make discussion easier, because you can try and challenge any element in that explicit chain of reasoning. On the other hand, if someone adheres to ideology X because they feel like it's right, I wouldn't know where to start.

The problem is their opinion often aren't actually based on first principles. Humans have a strong tendency to form an opinion for various emotional and social reasons, and then build up a set of justifications ex post facto, often without realizing it. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to do subconsciously and it's often harder for your ego to admit the strong role your id played.

But if that is happening, presumably it shows up in your reasoning and can be critiqued.

That's the dream :) but unfortunately it is quite difficult in practice, even when you are aware it is a potential issue. It seemed to make them more able to have nuanced discussions about some things, but much much more stubborn in the things they were confidently wrong about.

This requires the person to be self-aware to a significant degree. That is a completely different skill from logical thinking.

Logical thinking is one tool for developing self-awareness but not a necessary one.

For myself, I’m bipolar. Self-awareness is critical to keeping myself grounded and processing extreme emotions safely. Many people have told me I am an expert at this and I still fall into this trap again and again. I just eventually realize it.

I know many smart people who are blind or willfully ignorant of their own assumptions. This includes a number of vocal advocates of theology, philosophy, and rationality.

Parent is conflating intelligence with arrogance, with the underlying mispresumption being that intelligent people inherently lack self-awareness.

It's more that intelligent people are still human, and human beings are not good at being clear-headed when they feel that their identity is being attacked (ego protection). If you identify as "rational" or "intelligent" that makes you vulnerable to defensive behaviors to defend your self-perception.

> The problem is their opinion often aren't actually based on first principles. Humans have a strong tendency to form an opinion for various emotional and social reasons, and then build up a set of justifications ex post facto, often without realizing it. The more intelligent you are the easier it is to do subconsciously and it's often harder for your ego to admit the strong role your id played.

A more pithy/cheeky way of saying that would be the "Rationalists" are really Rationalizers.

I do not see much of rationalism in this article or in SCC for that matter, at least in the random samples I read.

Personally, I dislike rationalism /utilitarianism and still enjoy reading an occasional SSC article.

And this is the most glaring fault of the NYT. They just assume that Silicon Valley types take everything written on SCC as gospel. Which is understandable, since the totalitarian left enforces all-or-nothing views and the NYT is projecting their own shortcomings on Silicon Valley.

But Silicon Valley just wants to return to the free exchange of ideas of the Usenet age.

Libertarianism (and especially American libertarianism) is not the logical conclusion of rationalism in the minds of many rationalists. Rationalism is more about analyzing bias and using reason to the greatest extent possible than promulgating any particular political view. In fact, in this comment on LW[1] which I recently came across, Scott appears to compare using rationalist ideas to win specific political arguments to the dark side. Also, take, for example, the CFAR[2], where the workshops cover:

- How to combine conflicting intuitions from multiple sources, including your gut reactions, your analytic reasoning, and of course the opinions of others;

- The structure of your own goals and motivations;

- How to learn new skills faster

So perhaps if the only rationalists you've met are haughty libertarians, you've gotten unlucky.

I will say that the rationalist community tends to be liberal on social views, but that's probably because the community tends to be utilitarian, and it's hard to justify, for example, banning homosexuality in a utilitarian framework.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GfMSiorAsYeezpn9o/the-proble...

[2] https://rationality.org/workshops/upcoming

> But all of the rationalists I have met […] were […] taking that ideology to the logical conclusion that […] disagreeing with [libertarianism] was a moral or intellectual failing.

Interestingly enough, Scott Alexander published an entire essay disagreeing with libertarianism. Your rationalists' views are not representative of Scott Alexander's views. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

There are a lot of ideologies calling themselves rationalism, many of which feed into each other. Scott Alexander has basically invented his own, and it changes significantly over any given two-year period (as expected for somebody continuing to learn about the world); the best way (imo) to appreciate his articles is to read them, think about them and assume that around half of each is wrong (or, if you disagree with the core ideas of an article, which happens to me on occasion, that around half is right).

I found his politics around libertarianism to be a little ideologically incoherent, since he (correctly in my view) rejects the idea of labor/capital negotiations without unions to be fair and other things espoused in that essay. But then the archipelago and atomic communitarism (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...) piece was accidentally an argument that stumbled in some of the same ways libertarianism does. In the end, I don't think it's damning to have an incoherent ideology (almost everyone, myself included, seems to) and on the whole I think that his blog is interesting and has high upside. (There is a lot of other stuff that I find kinda repulsive tbh.) But it seems worth examining that ideology when it seems to have a lot of billionaires in its orbit, and especially when those people are going to end up shaping the future of life in the US in a big way. (Especially given that the world that they have such a large hand in creating doesn't seem to be working super well for a lot of people.)

He literally wrote an essay generalising “capitalism is bad”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. If a lot of billionaires read Slate Star Codex and took it to heart, he's one of the best billionaire-activists around. (Of course, it doesn't look like many did, and activism-at-billionaires is often considered not worth an activist's time.)

The vast majority of the time you see someone say they're making an argument "from first principles," they are insufferable human beings. Whether the end argument is wrong or not isn't even entirely relevant.

I have a similar opinion of the usage of the phrase 'systems thinking' in the context of 'you're just not a systems thinker.' Absolutely insufferable.

I enjoy SSC, thought that unmasking Scott was Not Cool, and agree with many that the NYT article crosses several lines of misrepresentation. But in the "politics are complex" side, I'm curious to hear what others think of this exchange linked in the article: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6rv2ib/did_...

On its surface, this reads that Scott supports D'amore's memo but doesn't want to be associated with it. Is there more context? In general, anybody advising others to hide their beliefs in order to be more persuasive should expect to invite speculation about what their own true intents are.

The safest thing is to downvote and not argue.

I've no clue whether Scott has turned into a misogynist over the past few years. (I think it unlikely, but theoretically possible.) I would assume, though, that he assumes that other people who say things that aren't inconsistent with his views while sounding like they agree with him are in agreement with him.

This is usually a reasonable heuristic, but it falls over when one person thinks “childhood malnutrition harms brain development, reducing intelligence, so improving the diet of poor children is urgent”⁰ and somebody else thinks “rich people are rich because they've earned their wealth because they're genetically really intelligent; it's social Darwinism”, but the only things the two are saying to each other are things like “poor people / members of minority ethnic groups score lower on average on IQ tests¹”.

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⁰: I've seen Scott make basically this argument – though it was probably about intestinal worms rather than nutrition.

¹: Since I brought this up, I'm going to use the opportunity to suggest that Scott has, historically, put too much credence on IQ tests as a proxy for intelligence. I was basically tutored to be able to do well in IQ tests, as a result of my background, and I've never seen him take things like that into account – despite the decades of academic research backing up my anecdote (IQ tests are culturally-specific).

They didn't say or ask if he turned into a misogynist. The question is about what he said. Not what he is.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc

I think the most you can infer from that exchange is that scott generally supports damore's questioning of the orthodoxy, but doesn't necessarily agree with the content of the memo itself.

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