I’m fairly new to this sub and it seems to me that quite a few people in this sub appear to think that the whole rationalist community is worthless. I don’t know just how much truth there is to this, as at the surface level their goals seem somewhat admirable at least.
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
The rationalist-influenced Effective Altruism movement has funnelled some money from techbros to people in third world poverty, which is overall pretty good. (of course, they’ve also wasted a shit ton of money on scammy AI institutes, so I don’t want to praise them too much).
Apart from that, I can’t really think of many actual achievements by rationalists that aren’t “wrote popular things”. There are even plenty of posts by rationalists themselves bemoaning this. The most succesful people that we know have been influenced by rationalists are, like, Peter Thiel and Dominic Cummings, which is not a good look.
I think it’s worthless because I don’t think rationality, as an ideal, is actually that useful. Let me explain.
When I was younger, I was an atheist. Still am, but back then I was… not your typical Internet Atheist (I was less of a God Delusion thumper than they were), but a whole lot closer. I thought the world would be a better place, overall, if people were rational, didn’t succumb to superstition, et cetera.
Rather importantly, I presumed that “rational” meant they agreed with me. They’d value nature, human rights, equality, et cetera, because I did, and I’m rational, and all those flaws in logical reasoning were preventing them from agreeing with me.
Fast forward to a few years ago.
It’s become increasingly obvious to me that a whole lot of the fascists and alt-right are atheists. It’s become increasingly obvious that “abolishing irrationality” or “ending religion” is pretty fucking useless, because the atheist movement is pretty much entirely co-opted by neo-Nazis and even if you got them to acknowledge that every shred of what they used to support their racist ideology was bullshit, I think they’d still be racist.
Meanwhile, I note that while I do get along with non-vocal atheists who have ethical beliefs similar to mine, I also get along with a whole bunch of pagans, non-extremist Christians, et cetera. Do I agree with them? No, I remain completely unable to believe in anything supernatural even if I wanted to. But despite them not being any more rational than the average person, their head isn’t up their ass.
My conclusion is this:
What I wasn’t seeing was that, while religious fundamentalists often did have shoddy reasoning and believed outright falsehoods, that’s not necessarily the reason they thought what they did. All ethical systems have axioms. “No sentient creature is inherently more valuable than another” is one of mine, as is “Nature is intrinsically valuable,” as is “Hierarchy should be avoided.”
Our conclusions about things like gay rights, global warming, and racism are, at best, built upon these initial axioms through logical reasoning. However, these initial axioms are fundamentally irrational. If someone’s base assumptions are racist, then trying to argue with them logically is, most probably, going to result in denial or result in them just not caring about the logical superstructure we usually use to rationalize our pre-existing beliefs.
So rationalism is after the wrong thing. A minimum amount of rationality is needed, yes, but people really already had it. Cultivating it, even if possible, won’t actually improve people’s lives that much.
People should just fight for what (I think) is right.
(Incidentally, this same applies to things like religion and science. Science ultimately rests upon certain metaphysical claims for which there can not be logical or empirical support. I think a lot of religion does as well. I’m sure a philosopher of science could go into more and better detail, though.)
what’s the value in surface-level admirable goals, exactly?
Sneering at rationalists is like jacking off to porn actors. The actors may have some other worthy accomplishments, but that’s not what I’m jacking off to.
They include some decent people, they have some reasonable views, they have some admirable goals, but the community—the social activities, the institutions—is just an endless thicket of grifts, far-right recruitment stations, grifts, sex cults, grifts, and more grifts.
I’m here to sneer at the bad bits.
Have you come to slay the dragon Sneer, champion of rationalism?
In the insurance industry, the Human Life Value of a person can be several million dollars. On the other hand, the community could be worth a whole lot more if you split them up given the prices for black market organs.
taking all into account, and being rather generous, no. no value at all.
The sub started as an offshoot of r/BadPhilosophy (which was mostly a circlejerk) and has since attracted folks who were invested to some degree in the rationalist project before walking away in disgust. Every now and then, an apologist shows up.
It’s definitely more about mocking Yudkowsky’s cult than trying to redeem it.
This subreddit is specifically for mocking rationalists. If you want a more neutral take on them, this isn’t the place to go.
I unironically enjoy rationalist ideas in science fiction, but that’s off-topic for Sneer Club. This sub is for sneering.
More seriously, a movement needs to demonstrate more than just intentions to be valuable. While the Effective Altruists do have some practical actions they can point to, SSC does not.
To the degree that there is value there, it is buried under miles of self-aggrandizing prose and stale cum. Like, Meditations on Moloch has some interesting ideas (assuming you’ve never gotten into Marx) buried in its billion-word runtime, but you also have to slog through that insane word count.
I’m curious about this question as well - are talking about rationalists vs empiricists ? Or strictly sneering at the LessWrong community?
Are there any present day thinkers who are actually worth indulging?
I had an idea that started as me explaining something about the weird fine details of major transitions in evolution to someone in the comments section there fester in my head until I got a published scientific paper 4 years later, so there’s that.
The problem, as almost anything in the world, is that you have to factor in the opportunity cost. Sure, there is some truth in Scott’s mumbling about Moloch and Yudkowski’s half-baked, half-pulled up of his ass ideas of inadequate equilibria. But by the time you read those huge Great Wall of text, you could have read a couple of well-explained, organic and rigorous books in game theory and industrial organization and have much more good and much less bullshit.
For sure college has a signalling component and probably the layman should be more aware of it (anybody with a college degree already is), but Caplan is completely dishonest in his methodology and you could easily learn not only about his (crumbling) theory of signalling in education, but an up-to-date theory of signalling in general reading the central chapters of “rational herds”, and then in a couple of hours you could have read some nice empirical studies about actual effect in education. Much more information, and much less rants on how you have to have a very high IQ to understand
Rick and MortyEnglish lit or Beethoven and how the average kid is a wasted beast of burden.Overall, the rationalist community (excluding Caplan obv, he’s just dishonest) at large looks like the intellectual equivalent of the person who prefers to pay much more in gas and maintenance for years rather than paying for a better car in the first place. They spend hours and hours going in circles around well settled ideas, because they never made the initial investment in time and effort to study properly what they are interested in, so they could learn how to learn, navigate the literature and lay their conjectures on solid foundations. And when they come too close to the awareness of the fact that this is the case, it makes the uncomfortable they rationalize it away saying that academia are all crooks because they are not Bayesian enough or something like that