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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

A problem with this whole mindset is that humans, all of us, are only quasi-rational beings. We all use System 1 ("The Elephant") and System 2 ("The Rider") thinking instinctively. So if you end up in deep denial about your own capacity for irrationality, I guess it stands to reason you could end up getting led down some deep dark rabbit holes.

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Some of the most irrational people I've met were those who claimed to make all their decisions rationally, based on facts and logic. They're just very good at rationalizing, and since they've pre-defined their beliefs as rational, they never have to examine where else they might come from. The rest of us at least have a chance of thinking, "Wait, am I fooling myself here?"

Wasn't the "fast&slow" thingy debunked as another piece of popscience?

The point remains. People are not 100 percent rational beings, never have been, never will be, and it's dangerous to assume that this could ever be the case. Just like any number of failed utopian political movements in history that assumed people could ultimately be molded and perfected.

Those of us who accept this limitation can often fail to grasp how much others perceive it as a profound attack on the self. To me, it is a basic humility - that no matter how much I learn, I cannot really transcend the time and place of my birth, the biology of my body, the quirks of my culture. Rationality, though, promises that transcendence, at least to some people. And look at all the trouble such delusion has caused, for example "presentism". Science fiction often introduces a hidden coordinate system, one of language and predicate, upon which reason can operate, but system itself did not come from reason, but rather a storyteller's aesthetic.

I think duality gets debunked every couple of hundred years

No?

Many specific studies on the matter don't replicate, I think the book preceded the replication crisis so this is to be expected, but I don't think that negates the core idea that our brain does some things on autopilot whereas other things take conscious thought which is slower. This is a useful framework to think about cognition, though any specific claims need evidence obviously.

TBH I've learned that even the best pop sci books making (IMHO) correct points tend to have poor citations - to studies that don't replicate or don't quite say what they're being cited to say - so when I see this, it's just not very much evidence one way or the other. The bar is super low.

Yup. It's fundamentally irrational for anybody to believe themselves sufficiently rational to pull off the feats of supposed rational deduction that the so called Rationalists regularly perform. Predicting the future of humanity decades or even centuries away is absurd, but the Rationalists irrationally believe they can.

So to the point of the article, rationalist cults are common because Rationalists are irrational people (like all people) who (unlike most people) are blinded to their own irrationality by their overinflated egos. They can "reason" themselves into all manner of convoluted pretzels and lack the humility to admit they went off the deep end.

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