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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed at the replies, the writing is atrocious to me. I'm hardly breaking the first few paragraphs without wanting to gag.

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Yes, that's kind of the point. It's written in what I assume is the style of a unintentionally or intentionally[0] bad Twilight fanfic.

[0]: see My Immortal if you want to witness Harry Potter and Twilight get butchered at the same time.

If you had allocated one second to rational thought you would have realised you are not the intended audience because you don’t understand it and thus won’t find it funny.

Before reacting to what might seem like flame bait, I tried to stay in style to the article and would like to point out that the ‘gag worthiness’ is intended and part of the joke.

Thanks, now that I understand, it is in fact clever

There's a fine line between being a parody of a style and just being bad. I'm not certain where this one falls, but it's not really working for me either.

Perhaps a subset of HN is just excited to take the "rationalist" movement down a peg, which I suppose is a positive development.

I'm not convinced it's positive, though I definitely understand the impulse. (And specifically wanting to take down LessWrong, which has turned very weird and navel gaze-y).

But it's a lot like the vitriol I see towards effective altruism. There's a good idea there (i.e. wanting to train oneself to think rationally, or wanting to do charity in a way that achieves the most good for the amount of money given). It's a bit sad to me that because the representatives of these ideas are flawed (rationality, LessWrong, Eliezer), or because they've been used as cover for shitty behavior (effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried) that the consensus becomes "there's nothing good here and it's all bullshit".

This pattern of throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems absolutely pervasive in modern discourse, you can see variations of it in people's thinking on vaccines, racism, democracy, journalism, freedom of speech, and global warming, to think of just a few examples.

Sorry, this became kind of a rant, but I really wish our internet discourse could do a better job of filtering babies from bathwater than it currently does.

I think rationalism as an idea is pretty good, and I found the article funny. It's mostly a parody of a type of rationalism that does not exist though, i.e. idealized economic agents, not the type of rationalism that people actually want, where you achieve whatever your existing goals are and minimize the chance of catastrophic error/failure.

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