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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both.

The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

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> the general lack of curiosity

Honestly, I find the Hacker News comments in recent years to be most enlightening because so many comments come from people who spent years immersed in rationalist communities.

For years one of my friend groups was deep into LessWrong and SSC. I've read countless blog posts and other content out of those groups.

Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider. It's an interesting group of people who like to criticize and dissect other groups, but they don't take kindly to anyone questioning their own circles.

> Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider.

No; you're being dismissed as someone who is entirely too credulous about arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Edit: and as someone who doesn't understand basics about what rationalists are trying to accomplish in certain contexts (like the concept of a calibration curve re the example you brought up of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions). You come across (charitably) as having missed the point, because you have.

You keep saying things that are proven to be trivially false with 5 seconds of examination, so I think the dismissal is justified.

Both the Rationalist community and the Rust community are very active in pursuing their goals, and unfortunately, it's far easier to criticize others for doing things than it is to actually do things yourself. Worse yet, if you are not yourself actively doing things, you are far more likely to experience fear when other people are actively doing things as there is always some nonzero chance that they will do things counter to your own goals, forcing you to actively do something lest you fall behind. Alas, people often respond to fear with hatred, especially given the benefit of physical isolation and dissociation from humanity offered by the Internet, and I think that's what you're seeing here on Hacker News.

I thought HN liked Rust? I learned Rust because I heard about it on HN back in the day. I don't want to start a debate about programming languages but if I were going to look for Rust fans, this is where I would expect to find them.

I mostly see non-Rust languages' communities on the defensive on HackerNews, not the other way around.

If you open any thread related to Zig or Odin or C++ you can usually ctrl-F "Rust" and find someone having an argument about how Rust is better.

EDIT: Didn't have to look very far back for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44319008

There is little ideological overlap between rationalists and Rust folks (and thank god for that). IME unlike the rationalists, Rust has actually done something useful for the world, and HN’s opinion of Rust and its community has drastically improved over the last decade.

The rationalists have not had any such clearly positive effects, and rather their adherents (Thiel, Vance, etc) have had severely deleterious effects on society.

There is no comparison between the two communities.

I don't know much about Thiel, but Vance does not seem like an "adherent" of rationalism in any way I recognize. I have trouble imagining Vance talking about "The Sequences" or "AI x-risk."

Mentioning Thiel and Vance together brings to mind a different thread of weird netizen philosophizing - one I don't really know much about but which I guess I'd sum up as the "Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin fandom." "Neoreactionaries" might be the right term?

I definitely recognize that the Venn diagram between those two "intellectual movements" (big scare quotes there) overlaps quite a bit, but it seems like a bit of stretch to lump what Vance, Thiel, and other right-wing tech bro types are up to under the rationalism banner.

Update: Having read through some of the other links in the thread, I have "updated" (as the rationalists say) my mental model of that Venn diagram to be slightly more overlapping. I still think they're distinct, but there's more cross-pollination between the Moldbugs and the ACX crowd than I initially realized.

What kind of commentary here have you heard here around the Rust community? I haven’t heard much. Certainly nothing close to violent. I’ve heard lots of shit talking regarding Go because they refused to introduce generics - and to be fair, the reasoning behind the refusal was smug arrogance led by the pompous cock rpike.

I will say as someone who has been programming before we had standardized C++ that “programming communities” aren’t my cup of tea. I like the passion and enthusiasm but it would be good for some of those lads to have a drag, see a shrink and get some nookie.

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