Well, in a big sense I think the answer is academia. If you want a bunch of people who toss around ideas and learn the secrets of the world and cite each other’s writing, it’s basically that. Except of course there’s a big barrier to entry: you have to spend a whole lot of schooling and then your entire day-job career to gain the amount of background wisdom and apply the amount of effort it takes to make even a tiny difference in the world’s new collective knowledge. This is the famous cartoon we show every newly minted PhD.

So a lot of the Rationalist project is: if we just memorize all this made-up jargon for common-sense ideas that we read in blogs and web forums, then we can have substantive enlightened discussion about extremely esoteric concepts and data, and maybe even make real constructive citation-worthy progress understanding it, despite being a bunch of computer programmers (no offense) with no other particular expertise who are just doing this in a few hours of our free time.

I submit that’s not something you should want to replace. I think if you come upon a 5,000-word blog post about a greatly studied and debated academic subject (whether it’s race science, quantum electrodynamics, philosophy, vaccines, evolution, or the shape of the earth), which was written by someone with no credentials or professional experience in the matter and cites mainly other blog posts or at best a single lightly skimmed popular book, then before you even start reading you should already know there’s no combination and permutation of those 5,000 words that could plausibly add something new to the subject that wasn’t already worked out and discussed and critiqued and maybe conclusively refuted by the people who spend 80 hours a week doing this stuff for a living - and even if the piece did have some kind of insight, it would probably be published somewhere more impactful than a pseudonymous personal web-log. That presumption is the difference between rational people and Rationalists.

I would say that the rationalist project at a grand scope is fatally flawed. That reinventing and reimagining the world with the power of RATIONALITY won’t produce better outcomes.

The reason is simple: we are bad at it. Humans. Really bad. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you know The Truth, and everyone else is weak brained garbage people.

But the reality is we are bad, or so bad, at making good arguments. Furthermore the world does not fall to the mighty analysis of Boolean logic, bayes theorem, or game theory. This is how we end up with rationalists arguing for “human biodiversity” - aka scientific racism.

The reality is we need a good grounding in morality before embarking on our journey. And we need to not discard said morality when it goes counter to our newly logic-ed beliefs. Because there should be no train of logic that tells you one person doesn’t deserve life any less than another.

I suspect the problem is people tend to learn morality at church / religious avenues. So once someone has decided “god doesn’t exist man” the entire edifice of religious beliefs fall apart. And everything is up for grabs to a good argument.

And dear friend, that’s bullshit. Because we can derive good morals without religion. And research seems to be indicating it may be biology based. And frankly, what IF there is some truth to “the old stories” and your life’s magnum opus is convincing everyone blacks have lower IQ?

Well, it would help to get an idea of what you believe rationalists claim to be. In my understanding, rationalism, as an internet community, was originally concerned with “mov(ing) our beliefs closer to reality, in the face of our natural biases such as overconfidence and wishful thinking, and our bias to believe we have corrected for such biases” (from Overcoming Bias) and “improving our reasoning and decision-making” (LessWrong). Beliefs about life extension and AI (HBD as a spinoff, I suppose) are then, in my opinion dubiously, derived from this more general effort: one must affirm these beliefs, among others, if one has become truly rational, or something like that.

If that is the aim, then I’d recommend first acquainting one’s self with the fields of study which have already been exploring this and related matters for centuries: logic, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, behavioral science, scientific methodology, and so on, and to study these subjects in a normal fashion rather than under a conceit of some contrarian genius.

For specifically about life extension, I don’t have anything coming to mind. Personally I’m skeptical that a longer life, in the scale of centuries, could be a better life. Philosophical concerns aside, I’d say that the various scientific research programs toward this goal are still, at this point, too fledgling for solid, reliable results toward longevity. From a practical approach, one would look into health science, fitness, dietary/nutritional science, etc.

There exists the subreddit /r/leftrationalism which presumably exists to be like what you want, but it’s pretty dead. Maybe it can be kickstarted with some activity or another place like it can be made; it seems like people regularly come and go through this subreddit on their search for what you want. I’m kinda hoping for something like this too, like the old LW sphere but with some good political awareness instead of its tumor of anti-sjw and hbd politics.

Left communism

Nowhere in your post do you talk about any concrete value that you hold, skill that you want to develop, or specific goal that you want to accomplish. Even “overcoming bias” and becoming “less wrong” are phrased negatively.

If I had to make a guess about the source of your ambivalence and discontentment, I’d start there.

The Long Now foundation

communists

What resonated with me a lot in HPMOR was the issue of longevity. I feel quite strongly about not wanting to die.

i’m not educated in philosophy and don’t know if this is the place for this, if not sorry and feel free to remove it ofc mods, but:

what do you believe metaphysically? i think emergentism (consciousness is just an emergent property of the complexity of brains) is often taken as the most rational, parsimonious metaphysical framework, but i think it’s actually a pretty strong claim. that the only reason things exist (because after all, if there was a physical world with no one to perceive it, it’d be indistinguishable from nothingness imo) is because the complexity of brains happens to have some interesting phenomenal byproduct.

i personally see it like this: you have a skin cell, and it is living. then you have a whole bunch of skin cells, blood cells, etc. and they collectively funtion as a higher order of consciousness: an animal. i just don’t think it ends there - i think groups of animals caan function at a sort of higher order, and groups of groups of animals, all the way up to the whole universe. i think brains just kind of attune this raw, purely experiential consciousness into an individualized, linear form fit for survival in a particular ecosystem on a particular planet, like a radio does a signal, or an individual christmas light in a string of em does an electric current. I think the linearity of time and the individualization/atomization of consciousness is an illusion.

since i started believing this, i’ve completely stopped fearing death (abstractly anyway; i’d still freak out if i was immediately about to die lol). if time is an illusion, i will always be alive in 2020, sitting on a couch typing this comment. if individuality is an illusion created by the brain, the death of the brain isn’t the end of existence, it’s the end of this lower order existence, a kind of assimilation into the greater whole. i’m almost kind of interested to see what that will be like^*

i think i’ve heard this called pantheism or panpsychism, and i’m curious on your thoughts on this, or more generally what your beliefs on the nature of consciousness are. again, i’m not philosophically educated, and i’m sure everything i’ve said here has been said far more succintly, concisely, and in depth by people smarter than i. this is just how i conceptualize it, sorry if i’m kinda reinventing the wheel here.

*: but actually “i” would be already experiencing it right now, just as “i” am existing as every conscious entity at every moment in all of time simultaneously, and there will never be any linear continuity between being a person and expierencing the greater whole. i was just trying to simplify to illustrate my views but yeah it’s obviously more complex than that

I was also initially drawn to the premises espoused by LessWrong, and subsequently turned off by how quickly they became dogmatic and unyielding in their focus on AI and The Written Word of the Yud.

Where had I seen this before…? So of course the question becomes: why does a group of seemingly intelligent, well-intentioned individuals seem to simply switch from one type of dogmatic belief to another? I submit that it’s because any group that does allow for internal criticism is eventually bound to repeat the same errors. It has to be baked in; the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.

So where am I going with this? To keep it succinct, I think the only solution is to engage in academic philosophical investigation. I am not an academic myself, so this has been quite a challenge, but I eventually found a philosophy study group. To have recommendations for reading on foundational works and a group of people to discuss them in a critical light has changed my perspective. This requires a commitment to getting through some tough reading, but its worth it.

Should I delve more into stuff like transhumanism?

lol, no.

Seriously, is the religious-like womb these rationalist fucks sprang from. They all want to live forever, the only difference is which ascension perk they pick to make-believe they’ll get there.

Some good suggestions in this thread from a year ago in /r/askphilosophy https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/cxe85z/philosophy_for_a_stem_dork/

Are you depressed?

r/neoliberal