My falling-out with the rationalist community
lcamtuf.substack.com
lcamtuf.substack.com
Leave the audience wanting more, I guess?
Then this describes the actual break:
> By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists. I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft.
In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more." The implication being that after this they no longer considered themselves a rationalist, nor engaged in its form of arguing.
ETA: FWIW, I mean... hard things are hard? It's the normal state of the world that people think they've done the hard thing but are actually just finding excuses to do what they want. People like J.D. Vance decide to be a Catholic, but turns out Jesus' actual teachings are so counter-intuitive that he still doesn't understand them and does them badly. Actually being rational is a difficult, mostly solo activity.
Quitting rationalism (or Christianity, or ...) because most of the people around you are just cosplaying is like quitting chess because most of the people around you are just playing around and never get past 1200 ELO. Or like quitting weightlifting because most people around you talk about reps and whatever but never actually push themselves enough to get past their current plateau. Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?
If a social creature plays chess in a club where everyone else cosplays, the first thing that creature will do is find a better group of players to raise the challenge. Most serious chess players end up doing that sooner or later.
Rationalists are also social creatures, so that principle remains the same. To pretend that a group of cosplayers wouldn't affect a rationalist's ability to be effective is, ironically, irrational.
Also, there can become serious negative implications to terminology at the critical mass of cosplay the author implies in the article. I have neighbors who are contractors and went in on a house together. They split up time amongst their families, using it as an investment and vacation house. For very good reasons they never refer to what they are doing as "time sharing." :)
That would make sense, except for the first paragraph mentioning that the Bankman-Fried thing and the Zizian murder thing didn't prompt them to write it. Both were long _after_ the Damore thing. The strong implication of the first paragraph was that there was some _new_ breaking point, but that's quite an old one.
You're right, there's nothing to indicate why they are writing now, when they actively resisted writing after SBF or the Zizians. Perhaps part of them felt like writing in response to those things would be unfair; perhaps part of them knew they weren't ready, and now they are.
Or maybe they know about some new scandal that's going to come to light in the next few months!
Aside from that, it's curious how I've been interested in these ideas (and following SSC) for like a decade and this is the first I've heard of the castle. But I do hear about the Against Malaria Foundation constantly from that direction, and I'm pretty sure they've received more than 15 million from self-styled "aspiring rationalists" and "effective altruists" (although these really aren't meant as identity labels and you're doing it wrong if you think of yourself that way; pg's "Keep your identity small" represents solid rationalist thinking).
> I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex / murder cult that originated from the same community.
I was expecting to hear about some latest 'rationalist' authority. But it's unclear what actually lead to the breaking point. I'd actually wonder if they hit publish too early.
Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.
During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results.
One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept what you're told to accept".
The lack of truth isn't due to it being hard or unachievable, there's enough of it to solve all major problems, it's not being pursued because of conflicts of interest.
I've been to a couple rationalist events in the Bay during peak rationalism (originally with an open mind but eventually resorted to gawking after people couldn't handle "but why..." style questions and prodding which is the norm in my line of work and past academic experience) and it was truly weird seeing supposedly well educated people fall for such obvious cult-like traps.
In hindsight, I guess there might have been an overrepresentation of neurodivergence in the community as well, and for some rationalism's simple precepts simply worked - though arguably you can integrate axiomatic thinking and formal logic with traditional religion as well (eg. Nicomachean Ethics or Ashtadhyay).
I am a massive supporter for data-driven decision making (heck, much of my undergrad was touching this kind of stuff), but mental models are meant to be tools not a crutch, and overindexing on them causes one to lose sight of the forest when amongst trees.
I'd also refute the notion on HN that the movers and shakers of the industry are overrepresented in the community - I actually found the rationalist community to be somewhat marginal in the industry as a whole but overrepresented among a specific type of chronically online individual. Indoor climbing, pickleball, and creative arts (eg. Pottery) are much more representative.
Was this run by match.com?
Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning.
The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.
If you say so.
That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).
It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. That's so typical, if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms", they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. Dishonesty is the defining feature of that "movement"
It's not a strawman. It's a central example of what I had in mind when I used the word "axiom".
> if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms"
They don't refer to wild conjectures as axioms.
> they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such.
There is no "blame" going on here. Someone said I sounded like a cult member (which incidentally is insulting and inappropriate on HN; but I thought I would try to steer the discussion back on course) and I correctly explained why that perception is irrelevant. When I said
> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.
That is, in fact, inarguably true. Bayes' Law is an example of that exact sort of thing. If you don't believe that conditional probabilities can be worked out that way, that won't change the fact that conditional probabilities can in fact be worked out that way; and it won't change the fact that in the long run I will be able to exploit your fallacy in games of chance.
The other poster gave no example of supposedly false or unsound axioms, so I cannot be strawmanning by failing to respond to them. My assertion is that such false or unsound axioms are not, in fact, in play. The burden of proof lies with those claiming their existence.
1. Someone says they don't like rationalism
2. You say there's no such thing
3. Someone else suggests your defense of rationalism is materially similar to how scientologists defend their cult
4. You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???
That's such a weird non-sequitur. Nothing before had anything to do with Bayes. That is just a straw man you constructed to argue with.
I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long.
> You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???
No, that isn't at all what I said.
First off, it makes no sense for the other party to characterize my "defense of rationalism" in any manner, because I was not offering such a thing. When I say that something doesn't exist, that isn't defending the thing. The thing cannot be "defended" if it doesn't exist in the first place!
Second, I very clearly did not deny any "material similarity". I said that any such material similarity does not matter.
Third, the truth of Bayes' theorem is not why I am correct, and that's also clearly not what I asserted. Rather, Bayes' theorem is an example of what I am correct about.
There is no non-sequitur there; you misrepresent the argument completely. I did not construct a strawman; I merely gave an example of what "rational beliefs" (which are, again, not articles of faith) entail. The point is that, by the same reasoning, you could equally well make out the hard sciences in general to be "cults". If you think you can look at a title for a work like "The Sequences" and instantly map that to "ooh, scary religious canon!", why does the same not apply to, say, Euclid's Elements?
The only strawmanning here is on your part.
I have no idea what strange or harmful articles of faith other people ITT seem to have in mind. Someone mentioned Roko's Basilisk, and as far as I can tell this is the closest the thread got; but that frankly doesn't qualify, either. It's just a proposed consequence of a particular decision theory, and most of the people who care about that decision theory seem to think it's fallacious. (Whether they can propose a fallacy within that theory, or think that this is a proof-by-contradiction refutation of the theory, I don't really know. Personally I think the latter is far more likely.) If it were actually an article of faith, you would see the equivalent of street preachers using it to solicit donations to MIRI. As far as I've been shown, that doesn't actually happen.
But since I haven't been given any better examples than that, I can't argue against them. No, "the Zizians exist(ed)" doesn't count here, first off because nobody's identified any articles of faith they held; second because nobody's drawn any connection between those and any actual principles of rationality.
Then you should realize your replies have been obnoxious, and that's why you're getting the responses you're getting. Have a fantastic day.
What on Earth are you talking about?
What is the supposed nonsense that I am supposedly convinced about?
> but that is all you disciples ever argue against.
Who is a "disciple"? First off, it's perfectly possible to defend members of groups that one doesn't identify with. But also I don't think the group is a natural category to begin with. I think it is outsiders that are thinking of them as a group to critique them.
> You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people
What education do you suppose is lacking here, and what is your evidence for it being lacking? Who are you to draw conclusions about the degrees of random groups of people?
> believing to "reason" yourselves to some higher "truth"
Can you show an example of the fallacious reasoning you've observed, and explain how it connects to anything that people like Yudkowsky or Alexander ever said?
> using some WILDLY misappropriated and misunderstood mathematical principles.
Can you show an example of such misappropriation or misunderstanding?
And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.
In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.
We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.
Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.
We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of causal mechanisms. But we can't prove by logical argument based on "fundamental axioms of reasoning" that these things are "true".
This is why unlike the rationists of the 17th century, modern "rationalists" predominately focus on empiricism (ironic i know). They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. This has the knock on effect of interest in prediction markets.
Is your impression otherwise?
Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in replacement for your brain. "Rationalists" often seem to talk as though they think it is--just follow this recipe and your thinking will automatically give the right answer. And anyone who tries to talk about limitations of this is obviously a crackpot.
> Is your impression otherwise?
Not with respect to obsession with Bayesian reasoning, no. But I seem to have a different take on that than you do. See above.
I just mean that your brain can do lots of other things besides Bayesian reasoning, and most of them can't be reduced to Bayesian reasoning.
For example:
A forecasting model estimates restaurant demand from years of bookings. Then a major concert is announced next door. A local manager immediately expects a packed evening, while the model predicts an ordinary Tuesday because it has never encountered that situation, and was not prepared for it. To do so would have not been reasonable based on the data available to begin with, after all.
So you can have someone opine about how well some argument is supported through Bayesian inference, and how another isn't, but that's only going to keep them honest in a limited sense. They can still miss the bigger picture by e.g. simply not knowing about it, and not knowing to check for it. If you don't either, they done misled you.
This failure mode is identifiable without having to reason about probability theory as well by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986444
If you're still unconvinced:
- why would BAND have a concert here? no concerts in this area, ever
- doesn't BAND have ties to this place? no sufficient evidence in the way of that
- BAND lead singer has hung out here once and liked THING, decided to have a concert here for sure one day on a whim
Individually, these have low local attributing info available, so you'd never be able to justify the inference. But not being able to justify the inference didn't make the claims wrong, just unfounded. Those are not the same thing. And so chasing probabilities like this, while maximizes how much your position is defensible, also boxes you in. You'll be reasonable in why you thought what you did, but that won't make you necessarily right, despite the suggestions otherwise.
Why cant the model be updated to include information about the concert? This is how basically every human works anyways.
It seems that yes, a bad model is not recoverable if you refuse to consider concerts or other data.
You can build a more elaborate model that can, but then that's still structurally constrained in terms of how it can adapt.
You can build a maximally general model that automatically captures arbitrary patterns, and estimates using them, but:
- that's not what people do and mean when using Bayesian inference in argumentation; they're the ones capturing and maintaining the patterns instead, manually and arbitrarily
- it kind of renders the whole thing meaningless; you basically get a machine learning model out of that, and introspectibility is not really their thing + it becomes quite literally arbitrarily adapting (and thus arbitrarily inferring)
One may also recognize that to be resembling a human, with whom you get the same issues. Kind of how one gets to arguing about empiricals and logic in the first place. This is what I describe in my other comment that I linked to, that debates using these instruments are basically just long winded coordination processes between people in the best of times, not some sort of divination tools.
I'm not the guy from above btw, but I am the guy who had their comment turn dead. I don't know why it did though, I doubt this subthread sees that much traffic, and I did not see it being flagged since I posted it. I'd assume it was automatically or manually moderated out.
Regarding the dead thing - sometimes that happens to me when I make rapid edits to fix typos and such.
I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".
There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.
Yudkowsky wrote them from 2006-2009, so he would have been in his late 20s.
> because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate
The Sequences are about pure reasoning, not about results from "studies". They are very much about how to analyze studies and about the fact that you should care whether they replicate.
In fact, I can't even recall any such "studies referenced".
> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith
Taken at face value, that'd mean bridging the analog hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole), which is fundamentally impossible. Logic proves consistency, not truth, despite the many related terminologies suggesting otherwise. This is further skipping over how people segment the world different, even relative to themselves over time, which thus forms a coordination problem.
It reminds me to how HTTP is stateless. Yeah, it's stateless - all the state keeping has simply been laundered a layer above. It may sound tantalizing to position certain arguments as simply rational (i.e. correct/optimal), but all that ultimately does is sidestep the actual coordination part, which never really went away. There is still an underlying segmentation model being asserted, it is just now coated in self-righteousness, an illusion of rigor, drawing up a false dichotomy of "either you segment the world like we do, and then you're correct, or you're incorrect, and your segmentation is too".
See this rhetorical landmine in action in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986530
Even if I go out of my way and interpret the word such that it merely means "acting on reason" (as opposed to some sort of nonreason), that doesn't mean much for the same reasons. You can have any arbitrary reason to act or think any particular way; possessing an explainable rationale on its own, even if internally coherent, is not necessarily one way or another.
No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.
Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.
If this doesn't apply to you, great, but then we're talking past each other.
(And no, forming a "community" does not make for an identity. I don't think of myself as a "HN user" and I would certainly never introduce myself that way offline. Similarly for Stack Overflow back when it was relevant, or anything else.)
In some cases, that point of commonality is just the venue (like your HN example). Not the case for this.
That said, I do appreciate the distinction and you may very well be right. Like certainly, one can appreciate logical thinking and quality argumentation without adopting any kind of group identity.
Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new orthodoxy in rigidly dogmatic ways, eventually becoming 'a movement' with schisms, in-group/out-group policing, deference to influential members and ostracism for heterodox views.
"Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...
> What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.
One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...
There is obviously no such thing.
The clear purpose of the subthread the two of you are engaging in is clearly against HN guidelines.
The entire point is that true statements are true, and false statements are false, regardless of who does or doesn't utter them.
> That graph looks incredibly un-diverse.
Which of age, childlessness, white skin, being male or US citizenship is an "ideology"?
Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.
For example, "Do you prefer modern or older architecture?" shows 20% chose 1, 34.6% chose 2, 25.6% chose 3, 15% chose 4, and 4.8% chose 5.
WTF does this mean? I don'e see anything that says what those labels mean. I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y but in what order?
But some aren't comparisons. One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?
Yes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale
> but in what order? ... One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?
These things become clear by cross-referencing with the actual survey (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZLCk8_L64hen93A2g...).
> From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn
Do people do this in practice? 80K for example (EA not rat, but EA is the policy arm of rationalism after all) expressly warn against this. Feels like a strawman.
"Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality."
So many "things" where its "we're the good guys club and if you're not in our club you're the bad guy".
Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)
And Dawkins never had much of a research career.
My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.
There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.
So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.
Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.
Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.
Engaging with someone's ideas isn't the same thing as throwing yourself behind that person. There are a number of public writers associated with rationalism (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander probably being the most famous), but the social scene isn't defined by following them as leaders or thinking their ideas are correct.
> My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.
The skeptics didn't think the paranormal was an easy target they were punching down at, they thought it was a corrosive, poltically-powerful, and immoral force in US poltics that was leading towards bad ends. Also what you call the paranormal they call "institutional Christianity in US poltics" - even that choice of words has poltical valence.
> There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.
I think this is you personally simply having a somewhat different set of poltical concerns than the skeptics did (in part because time has passed since their heyday, and the landscape of American poltics has shifted some), and wanting them to care about exactly what you are about and not about what they cared about, without wanting to claim that their object-level concerns were necessarily wrong.
and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...
(Though in a way that feels a little derivative; I suspect that many of the principals just took _Hyperion_ _way_ too seriously, tbh...)
In the end, even I can't escape bias. And when I realize how ignorant I am, I feel like I have no choice but to live face to face with how pathetic I am.
Even if I'm aware of my bounded rationality and ignorance, there are still moments when I fail to recognize even that ignorance. I feel like I just have to live with the awareness of how contradictory a being I am
I'll admit I won't be entirely able to stick to the virtue of only wanting to find out which of downvoters were justified whenever the situation pops up
Nowadays I'll only say that idea was bad BC it's hard (emotionally, at least) to reverse once implemented
Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.
Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant.
A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way."
Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.
So I think the author is maybe overreacting in that one. The rest, what he says about "rationalists" going after flat earthers and intelligent designers etc with a list of logical fallacies at hand, for sport, that's very true.
So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion.
If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas.
If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion.
All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut.
I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.
one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.
This is not true of rationalists! "Straw Vulcan" as a failure mode was talked about fifteen years ago - https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan
The rational person does not engage with the argument. Because there is nothing to be gained from the argument.
The winning move is not to play.
That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evidence for why those priors should be accepted.
(Except that they don't claim them to be "their own beliefs" but instead call them "priors".)
How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them?
How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member of the 5% (and if those percentages are accurate).
You can observe the same dynamic in any church. Everyone in the congregation will have different levels of belief, but when it comes to sharing a testimony you'll be hard pressed to distinguish between who the true believers are and who's just "faking it until you make it".
What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1]
> What beliefs?
It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk.
> What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs and are instead simply having fun with it. Only a small 5% are actually sincere.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/les...
If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the available evidence and the other 95% think the evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
> I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
I never claimed I could or that I observed such a thing. The 95/5% didn't come from me, it came from the person I responded to.
My point was that
- It's impossible to distinguish who's a true believer and who isn't.
- That the meetups of the rationalists re-enforce beliefs, particularly in true believers. Also that these beliefs of the rationalists can be pretty whacky and based on a jenga tower of priors.
- That there isn't "nothing" a rational person could do to dissuade someone from a whacky belief.
I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data.
If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.
[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...
[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...
> This is a textbook study of motivated reasoning
What would be his motive, why would he have preconceptions about you?
Could it be that it's your messages here that are motivated, and with scarce reasoning?
A libertarian socialist podcaster tries to discuss an online culture that is adjacent to Silicon Valley tech scene. He then proceeds to take movement’s worst manifestations as its essence. One would have to be naive to miss the source of his bias.
Take his advice to talk with (and listen to!) people outside your cadre, and to consider the possibility that you're entirely in the wrong. And maybe to touch grass.
Cheers
A part of me somewhat wishes I was this easily swayed by YouTube smooth talkers.
It would be highly surprising if an open-access online community with the kind of slogans that might be particularly appealing to somewhat spectrumy individuals did not occasionally attract some eccentrics. The point I am trying to make here is that these are pretty fringe offshots and are far from the representative views of the community as a whole. Appeals to reason don't make any community immune to human nature. After all, their main place of gathering is named "less wrong", not "correct".
There was also someone else ITT pointing out that the community are not at all uniform, and that got a pithy response about it being largely "childless white male Americans" as if that is supposed to matter (and disregarding that fully 5% of survey respondents consider themselves not cis, and 19% not straight, which are both way above baseline).
So pardon me if I don't consider this sort of question to be in good faith.
If you start reasoning from first principles you can very easily make an incorrect assumption somewhere down the line that snowballs until you're talking about shrimp welfare, or making decisions based on the potential sextillion humans that exist in 1,000,000 AD, or planning to convert the entire universe into unthinking organic matter that can only experience bliss.
I think it is more that teenagers and very young adults and people high in the trait of "openness to new experiences" are more susceptible to nonsense and more attracted to new intellectual movements, of which the rationalist community is one.
Also, I expect a rationalist to be lower in conscientiousness than average (because the conscientious people are too busy to devote a lot of time to reading long intellectual texts) and low conscientiousness makes violence and other transgressive behavior more likely.
That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them.
If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously dangerous cult.
There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way.
> That, along with constantly calling yourself rational
This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.
But it is insane to say that EA and rationalism* are not about believing you are superior and more rational than your peers, or that most EA/rats don’t make an identity out of it (look at any of their online presences). Anthropic literally exists to funnel money and influence to its EA/rat cofounders and early investors, who sincerely believe that they and they alone are smart and rational enough to shepherd our society through its “technological adolescence”. I wish people who agree with this would at least be honest about it.
I know he's EA, but let's not pretend that EA is so distinct from the rationalist community.
Everyone implicitly believes the above when they believe the concept of a "backwards society" can even exist, or when they think their own society would be better if their lost candidate had power. In both cases you think that there exist a set of values that are better to live under than what the democratic process resulted in.
I think actually most people believe this about their own values. I could find you infinite posts online that say "humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"
I'm far from sure that even the rationalists' god-like AI could play that role, even in the extremely unlikely hypothesis that it will materialize at some point.
Not to mention that the best set of values could change with the circumstances, and most of all values are a vague concept, WAY too vague to make a dictator behave properly in all circumstances, even if he were somehow compelled to always follow them.
> humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"
Even people wishing that don't necessarily long for a dictatorship, far from it; you could wish for the party you loathe to not exist, but still want everything else of your democratic system to stay unchanged (the possible parties are infinite, removing one doesn't necessarily turn your system into a single-party system).
Can I ask you if it's an idea you developed yourself or you read about it somewhere?
I don't think I read about this, it just seems obvious that if a truly great intelligent leader leads a country it's better than the stupid masses voting about things.
you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example