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This is not a bad comment, all things considered. The quoted article seems broadly reasonable, and aside from the questionable scare quotes the framing seems like a nice relatively neutral discussion starter. It’s also, I think, the comment that has finally snuffed my hope that there’s a germ of a reasonable worldview underneath the weird pseudoscientific racism and gender essentialism.

Chalk it up to “inferrential distance”, I suppose, but I have trouble imagining anyone finding this insightful or novel, regardless of their political leanings. It’s not even PoliSci 101. Separation of Powers as a check against tyranny was an idea I picked up from a junior high civics lesson. We literally teach this to children.

There’s an old joke where I’m from about people who like both kinds of music: country and western. I get the impression that SSC appreciates both fields of human knowledge: mathematics and the hard sciences. And even then only up to about a sophomore level.

I want to like the rationalist project, I really do. Learning to update my beliefs when the real world disagrees? Sounds good. Recognizing and working around (some of) my cognitive biases? Sign me up. Setting aside rhetorical skill and focusing on the underlying facts? Aways a useful exercise. I’ll even climb on board the consequentialism train. But the more I actually interact with the community the more I notice that the gulf between theory and practice is just staggering.

I can produce a cogent libertarian argument if called upon. Classical liberal too. Hell, at this point I could probably manage a passable impression of a white supremacist position. I may disagree (often vehemently) with the premises, but I can follow arguments made from those premises and largely guess where people who do accept a set of premises will end up on any given issue. The apparent fact that no one there can do the same for my fairly milquetoast progressivism is telling. The fact that no one see this as a giant red flag about which direction the inferrential gap might flow doubly so.

It’s frustrating that nobody makes the connection between “epistemic humility” and privilege.

It’s frustrating how few people seem willing to subject their stereotypes to the same level of critical analysis that they do the other well understood cognitive biases.

It’s frustrating that nobody seems willing to wrestle with the sheer variety of previous “race realist” arguments which were both superficially convincing and demonstrably incorrect.

It’s frustrating that nobody makes the connection between misleading emotionally resonant anecdotal arguments and holding up James Damore as a martyr at every available opportunity.

It’s just frustrating, start to finish. So WTF went wrong?

[deleted]

I think it's good to learn to instill a greater sense of fallibilism, and to learn about psychology because it's interesting. But yeah, the whole Rationalist^TM movement almost seems like it was invented as a social experiment to prove your point. It degenerates into the same thing as memorizing logical fallacies to own people. http://existentialcomics.com/comic/21
Easy to understand if you replace "bias" with "good". Any metric used to value people will be compromised by the brain's impulse to protect the ego. Sort of a rationalist virtue signalling, eh?

I can’t stop thinking about a question I saw on History Stack Exchange recently: “Why was the Cold War carried out over the whole world instead of between Siberia and Alaska?” Everyone thinks the USA and USSR are far away from each other, but upon careful study, it turns out that they’re actually right next to each other. Why wouldn’t they just launch nukes at each other over their nearest border?

It’s ‘logical’ for someone to ask this after looking at a globe, yet the question is filled with incorrect assumptions making it so nonsensical it can’t be answered in the questioner’s terms. At best you can put some work into explaining how it doesn’t work the way they think it does, but you can’t address their original line of inquiry because they are still staring at that globe and seeing Siberia nearly touching Alaska. And they’re not even wrong.

This is what the rationalists are constantly doing. They find data from one axis that seems to be indisputably correct but they don’t have the perspective or experience to avoid their unacknowledged assumptions when drawing a conclusion. When confronted with an existing consensus idea, they place the burden of proof on the current consensus to justify itself in accordance with their newly evidence-backed assumptions about the way things should work; if they haven’t heard of it, it must be reevaluated from scratch. They are prepared to adjust their priors if their data is wrong and think that’s sufficient humility, but this data is irrefutable and got them a conclusion that registered properly with their thought processes, so it’s already past that stage. They can’t accept that the data can be true but produce a false conclusion.

> It's 'logical' for someone to ask this after looking at a globe Even that's not clearly "logical." Plans made during the Cold War also included attacking via the North Pole.
But why would you shoot across all of Canada when Russia is just over the Bering Strait?
Because nothing strategically important is Russia is just across the Bering Strait and nothing strategically important in the US is in Alaska \(a few isolated military bases aside\). The things Russia would care about attacking \(Washington, major missile installations, large population centres\) are in the continental US and the fastest way there from Russia is over the north pole.
The whole point is that the person with this idea sees an obvious solution that no one seems to have considered and can't figure out why, but it only seems obvious because their assumptions are wrong. Apparently they have a worldview where war is about getting from your landmass to your opponent's landmass and it so makes sense to attack the nearest border, and if that were true, they would be right. You can't explain to them why they're wrong without introducing new concepts that they haven't accepted as true. It may be pretty simple to explain here, but in general if someone is confident and attached to their previous way of thinking, then they won't be satisfied with an answer that rejects the terms of the question.

[deleted]

That's kind of my point, though. It's just barely different enough from the dictionary definition to separate people who _know_ the concept from people who _understand_ the concept. And it's not a terribly difficult concept to understand for anyone who's taken the advantages of "big government" seriously for more than five minutes, whether they believe in it or not. Maybe it's just me, but the generalized idea of multiple independent actors with different agendas exercising checks on one another is such a rudimentary concept in small-l liberal thought that it confused me how anyone could be as engaged with political philosophy as the commenters seem to be without at least picking up a working understanding by accident. Then I thought about how many brain cycles I've spent in good faith bothering to understand the nonaggression principle or the concept of self ownership and my confusion turned to anger. Anger gave way to a kind of sad pity and the next thing I know I'm posting in r/SneerClub. I had been on the fence up until now between "wow, nobody here seems to have any clue how stuff like multiculturalism and liberal democracy actually works" and "all these otherwise intelligent sounding people, all of whom otherwise have let's just say impressively open minds, seem to have uniformly rejected a bunch of ideas I still take very seriously; maybe they all know something I don't". This was what made up my mind.
It seems like your beef might be bigger than the self-proclaimed rationalist community, because Politico Magazine (a fairly widely-read, mainstream media source well beyond the smugsphere) thought this concept was interesting and novel enough to run a 2,500 word article about it. Skipping to the end of the piece, I see it's actually adapted [from a new book](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062696199/can-it-happen-here) so Harper Collins publishers thought it was worthy of a whole book. Maybe the entire haute bourgeois are less familiar with political science than you?
I expect the entire most people are less familiar with political science than me. I'm no expert, but it is a hobby of mine and I take it seriously enough to expect to be a good deal better versed in it than the average layman. The average self described rationalist who has self selected into the elaborate, jargon heavy political theory thread, on the other hand... Generally when I run across an unfamiliar political theory I like to read up on it at least enough to understand why an otherwise reasonable and thoughtful person might find it appealing; to identify the values it grew out of and compare and contrast then to my values. It rarely changes my mind, but it always helps me to understand the world better and builds empathy with people who I disagree with. It sounds really naive now that I'm writing it out, but I had hoped a collection of self styled intellectuals would have adopted similar habits for themselves.

This is a great post, I applaud you for writing it.

That said, my answer to the questions you raise puts me in a radically different position than you.

“WTF went wrong” for me, is, well, actually “WTF ever was right?”

Yes, I agree with you, the complete inability of Rationalists to behave according to their own self-proclaimed principles is gob-smackingly stunning. And it’s frustrating in the same way that hypocrisy everywhere is frustrating, especially when the hypocrites are those who just love correcting the behavior of those around them (and no one loves correcting the Wrongs more than a LessWrong.) Your post captures several of the most glaring of these quite perfectly, but we both know you could’ve Alexandered that list of frustrations into another 10000 words or so.

But consider an alternative question: What if the very foundational principles of rationalism are just bad principles?

Learning to update my beliefs when the real world disagrees? Sounds good.

It sounds good if anyone, anywhere could agree on what constitutes the real world.

Recognizing and working around (some of) my cognitive biases? Sign me up.

This one continues to confound me. It’s easy to recognize biases in others. But in myself? Surely any bias worth its salt would prevent me from recognizing itself?

Setting aside rhetorical skill and focusing on the underlying facts?

Maybe this one’s just personal but I consider rhetorical skill a supreme virtue. (And as previously alluded, I don’t really believe in facts.)

I’ll even climb on board the consequentialism train.

I just can’t. Even if I believed in an objective material reality, I surely don’t believe in my ability to do a cost benefit analysis of an infinite number of actions or non-actions on that reality.

Here’s where I’m coming from. I’m no solipsist – I believe that there is some world outside myself, mainly because I keep hearing these voices coming from it. And I already have a voice, so they’re probably not mine.
But these voices are contradictory, and often incorrect, and even frequently incoherent and dumb. Which leads me to believe that my voice probably sounds incoherent and dumb to some of them, as horrifying as that sounds.

So how do we adjudicate between the voices? How can we determine, finally, which statements are true? We can’t. And for the most part, even attempting to try is a fool’s errand, as likely to drive us mad or cause someone harm as it is to help anyone. The quest for objective knowledge, properly understood, is a barely-concealed quest for power among and over the voices.

All we can do is try to hear the voices and help the voices. The voices seem to matter, at least to themselves. Whatever they are right or wrong about, it doesn’t matter. Let it go. Being correct is unimportant.

I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes the best thing you can do for the universe is to…. listen and believe.

[deleted]
Plot twist: I am a "STEMlord" and it was my CS degree that taught me to think this way
> So how do we adjudicate between the voices? How can we determine, finally, which statements are true? We can't. And for the most part, even attempting to try is a fool's errand, as likely to drive us mad or cause someone harm as it is to help anyone. The quest for objective knowledge, properly understood, is a barely-concealed quest for power among and over the voices I actually get where you're coming from, but I do disagree somewhat. I can't know things, but I can suspect some things are more likely to be true than others. I may not be able to be right, but I can probably be (and I truly do apologize for this) less wrong. Unlike a lot of the posters here I'm not an academic; I'm an engineer. I like pragmatic tools that may not be theoretically solid in every edge case but which work well for the situations I actually need to use them in. I don't want to get a PhD in philosophy; I want someone else to get a PhD in philosophy and then to write _A Practical Users Field Guide to the Human Consciousness_, so to speak. The less crazy half of _The Sequences_ don't have any particularly original insights in them, but they presented a few old ideas in frames that felt accessible to me for the first time and, I think, changed some of my habits of mind for the better. The more crazy half, unfortunately, accidentally reinvented Calvanism. At this point I'm mostly just hoping that engineer's disease is the kind of bug you develop an immune response to eventually. > I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the best thing you can do for the universe is to.... listen and believe. On this, however, I think we're 100% in agreement. Consider this one more voice in your choir in favor of empathy and humility.
> I don't really believe in facts. Is that a fact?
This is an extremely depressing outlook. If what you say is correct (ha!) then why should anyone "help"? How would you even know if actions you believe to be helping actually are?

Closed ecosystem of Less Wrong was vulnerable to virulent highly-evolved memeplex.

Memetics is a dumb pseudoscience consisting of equal parts rephrased common sense and groundless theorizing.
The best part is when rationalists breezily acknowledge this, then go right back to talking about it like it’s a real science. There’s a bit in one of his essays where Scott literally goes “Memetics is discredited pseudoscience. Now, here’s a ten-paragraph analogy about memetics that totally proves my point.” Way to follow through on your conclusion there guys.
Isn't that Scott's go-to rhetorical move? Acknowledging a fatal counter-argument right before completely ignoring it?
Whenever I see memetics, I just read it as "I don't understand social science or history."
Are you saying that memes ... are a spook?
no

To be honest the real problem with the Rationalosphere, in my view, is that they’re just not very good rationalists. I still think the ideas of rationalism as self-improvement, overcoming bias, etc, are worthwhile and interesting. But Rationalism with a capital R as an internet commentariat subculture is pretty remote from that. It’s frustrating and a real shame, but the sooner you recognize that, the better.

It’s not even PoliSci 101. Separation of Powers as a check against tyranny was an idea I picked up from a junior high civics lesson. We literally teach this to children.

To be fair, I would wager a lot of people posting are probably age 15-25. The average citizen functionally stops learning around late highschool (including college grads)

The apparent fact that no one there can do the same for my fairly milquetoast progressivism is telling

This is what is the killer imo