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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article.

Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who knows a staggering amount about quantum mechanics - says he likes rationality, and gets less charity than Mr. Beast. Huh?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649

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The people commenting under the Mr. Beast post are probably different to the people commenting under this post.

Anyway, Mr. Beast doesn't really pretend to be more than what he is afaik. In contrast, the Rationalist tendency to use mathematics (especially Bayes's theorem) as window dressing is really, really annoying.

What HN has for the rationalist movement isn’t just annoyance - it’s deep contempt and hatred.

Most people are trying to be rational (to be sure, with varying degrees of success), and people who aren't even trying aren't really worth having abstract intellectual discussions with. I'm reminded of CS Lewis's quip in a different context that "you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right."

Being rational and rationalist are not the same thing. Funnily this sort of false equivalence that relies on being "technically correct" is at the core of what makes them...difficult.

There's more to the group identity than just applying logic and rationality, yes. But surely 'rationalists' of all people wouldn't want to take the position that some of their key ideas don't result primarily from applying rational thought processes. Any part of their worldview that doesn't follow immediately from foundational principles of logic and reason is presumably subject to revision based on evidence and argument.

Right but their version of rationality is very much lacking in emotional and even social intelligence. In fact it seems those traits are discouraged in discussions. Instead things are viewed from a purely Bayesian/Spock/Sherlocke/Data style perspective. These arguments can only make sense by assuming far more predictive power (or far less accounting for chaos and hidden variables) and by developing blind spots not found in softer arguments which have their own problems but at least try to consider ethics and economics from more nuanced perspectives.

Their core principle seems to be that many or even most answers to humanity's problems can be well defined in the first place and then solved by invoking Bayesian logic. This is only true in a frictionless vacuum.

Fittingly enough, the Rationalist community talks about this a lot. The canonical article is here ("I can tolerate anything except the outgroup").*

The gist is that if people are really different from us then we tend to be cool with them. But if they're close to us - but not quite the same - then they tend to annoy us. Hacker News people are close enough to Rationalists that HN people find them annoying.

It's the same reason why e.g. Hitler-style Neo Nazis can have a beer with Black Nationalists, but they tend to despise Klan-style Neo Nazis. Or why Sunni and Shia Muslims have issues with each other but neither group really cares about Indigenous American religions or whatever.

* https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

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