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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering if it's relevant that so many of them are young people with "data science" degrees and they call themselves "rationalists". Sounds like they have some sort of superiority complex that might make them more susceptible to justifying acts of violence when it's "rational".

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> "rationalists". Sounds like they have some sort of superiority complex

Oh yes, this is totally a thing. They're also weirdly obsessed with I.Q. comparisons. They're the kind of community where you might actually witness someone talking about "High I.Q." and "Low I.Q." individuals - and making a claim like "my I.Q. is one of the highest", way before someone else made that cool.

So, like Hacker News?

Never seen that happen here.

It happens, but in a more subtle way. Usually direct comparison's don't happen, but rather is expected to be inferred by the quality of arguments, whether they can prevail with their line of thinking and so on. In a sense, that variant of 'rationalist' is rather crude in comparison. I am trying to think of an appropriate example, but I am struggling a little.

Make no mistake, there are egos at play here too.

Did you win the Putnam though?

Yeah well I've never seen violence happen in the rationalist community, but I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find instances of Hacker News posters committing murder too.

I feel like it's reasonable to assume Hans Reiser would have been on hackernews if it had existed before he murdered his wife.

Reddit ;)

Perhaps. Rationalists are also known for updating[changing] their beliefs. They do this under the guise of "doing" Bayesian reasoning. It may be that susceptibility to cults is an edge case of this meta-congnitive position. Or in other words, stubbornness of beliefs may be a defense mechanism against cults.

They are known for “updating” their beliefs to crazy things, and discounting evidence in front of their face based on abstract arguments.

let's stigmatize admitting when you were wrong. never changing your mind is the only way to avoid joining a murder cult!

That’s what “rationalist” should mean. It is not what they do in practice.

At the same time, if psychological research proves there's a class of people who are only prevented from joining a murder cult by their unthinking devotion towards conformist beliefs, would you be surprised?

Pointing out a tradeoff isn’t the same as arguing for the other extreme. That’s splitting[1], a well-documented cognitive distortion. A bit of therapy can be great for catching these patterns—sharpening your reasoning toolkit, so to speak.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Trying to reason everything out from first principles can lead to some seriously bizarre conclusions if there's even a little bit you missed or got slightly wrong. It can be a fun exercise if you make sure to constantly look for predictions to check against observable reality, but if you're young and naive and take it too seriously without doing that...

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