Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

I thought you meant to imply that rationalists believe they're perfectly rational. Lots of people do so.

That is what I meant, yes. I don't believe obviously false things like that, no.

> My guess is that contemporary 'rationalism' doesn't actually descend from any explicit philosophical tradition, just because if you read an introductory philosophy book, you'd not join a group with that name combined with their ethos.

It definitely doesn't. The community started in almost complete ignorance of philosophy in general and that philosophy had already covered everything they were trying to.

> I'm not that well versed in analytic philosophy - I think it's come a long way since the early days, so now straddles both sides of the rationalist/empiricist divide.

I'm pretty sure they meant "rationalism" comes from analytic philosophy, which I don't think it does although now at least they've realized it exists. Actual rationalism predates both by approximately three centuries.

The meaning of the word can change and it will change sooner or later, in Anglo-sphere or somewhere else.

Historically, the meaning of "rationalism" changed both trough time and cultures.

The way "rationalism" is being used by the lesswrong crowd is currently accepted for example by Polish dictionaries:

Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ):

3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"

Also from: Williams B., Rationalism, [w:] D.M. Borchert (red.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, t. VIII, Thomson Gale, 2006, s. 239-247, ISBN 0-02-866072-2.

Rationalism in the enlightenment

The term rationalism is often loosely used to describe an outlook allegedly characteristic of some eighteenth- century thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly in France, who held an optimistic view of the power of sci- entific inquiry and of education to increase the happiness of humankind and to provide the foundations of a free but harmonious social order. In this connection “ratio- nalistic” is often used as a term of criticism, to suggest a naive or superficial view of human nature that overesti- mates the influence of benevolence and of utilitarian cal- culation and underestimates both the force of destructive impulses in motivation and the importance of such non- rational factors as tradition and faith in the human econ- omy. Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Condorcet, among others, are often cited in this connec- tion. Although there is some truth in these criticisms, the naïveté of these and other Enlightenment writers has often been grossly exaggerated. Also, insofar as “reason” is contrasted with “feeling” or “sentiment,” it is somewhat misleading to describe the Enlightenment writers as rationalistic, for many of them (Denis Diderot, for exam- ple) characteristically emphasized the role of sentiment. Reason was praised in contrast with faith, traditional authority, fanaticism, and superstition. It chiefly repre- sented, therefore, an opposition to traditional Christian- ity.

Here there are two contrasts with the seventeenth- century rationalism of Descartes and others. First, this rationalism is not characteristically antireligious or non- religious; on the contrary, God in some sense, often in a traditional sense, plays a large role in rationalist systems (although Spinoza’s notion of God was extremely unorthodox, and it is notable that the opposition of rea- son and faith is important in his Tractatus Theologico- Politicus). Second, the view of science held by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire was different from that of rationalism, being much more empiricist. The central contrast embodied in the term rationalism as applied to the earlier systems is that of reason versus experience, a contrast that is certainly not present in the Enlightenment praise of the “rational.”

Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID science is wrong. Doesn't matter what it's about - if it contradicts official narratives then it's probably going to disappear within an hour or two.

One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.

I think I went down a somewhat similar route. It's easy to find oneself trying to embody some archetypal champion of "logical" and "rational" thinking when you're a highschool nerd.

In the end I think my issue that led me off it was that it just ended up being a) judgmental and b) like you, finding that I was just not right enough to justify it!

When I ran into more of those types (our types?) Who are a dime a dozen in a college engineering department my goto quip was:

The scientific method is the admission that rationality and logic are limited; they're just the first step — forming a hypothesis. The rest of it is about how your rationality and logic failed you.

I think this is partially why you find many rationalist and skeptic types not actually doing any science. They haven't had the humility beat into them by science yet, haha.

Another thing which helps is to not just automatically have an opinion on everything, even if somewhat informed.

It's ok to say "I don't know, this is very complex, even if I spent many hours reading about this matter". Too many rationalists just go with the option which seems a bit more plausible and then behave as if they have near certainty.

I was once attracted to it, and to EA, because of the surface-level values. It seemed like a community that wanted to acknowledge their own biases and work past them, yet in practice, it is a community that uses intellectualism as an aesthetic to confirm their preconceived biases. In its malignant form, you have LW and adjacent communities engaging in scientific racism revival. In the less malignant form, you have people working backwards and pretending that the conclusions they came to were "objective" because of the flowery Bayesian language they dressed their thought experiments in, as if they're constantly doing complex Bayesian inference in their heads. In the end, what was striking, to me, was the lack of humility you'd expect from those who agreed with the LW premise.

Similarly with EA, I liked the idea of optimizing charity for the most good, but in practice, the community seems to have no problem dedicating a ton of money, time and effort to MIRI and adjacent groups and people, because they've managed to use their intellectual aesthetics to spook themselves into believing that science fiction is reality. As a result, very real problems people experience today are discounted in favor of whatever scary future AI meme is spooking the community this month.

It's really kind of funny when you think about it, it's just a shame that they suck up so much oxygen in the room.