Yeah, don't leave up hanging. What was the crime and how did you solve it?

Yeah I know it sounds weird. As I see it, even the worst person in the world isn't going to be the worst at *everything*. Usefulness for helping to solve criminal cases aside, they're still awful condescending jerks. And maybe if they stopped their dumb obsession with AI they'd actually notice how much good they could do as professional investigators. Not that they're actually likely to do that. :/ EDIT: some SSC types might, but LessWrongers not so likely to have that epiphany I think.

I imagine that young folks exiting rationalism and discovering *the literature* feel very much like the archetypical Soviet defector exploring a supermarket for the first time.

*Discourse on Metaphysics* is rationalist fiction. 🎤🖐

I was stuck under a rock my whole life. i dont have much background in the history of philosophy unfortunately. And there are some rational fics that are entertaining even though I don't agree with their world views. but since then ive been branching out more and reading other things more.

right now my general view is that culture is what personality looks like when you zoom out to larger populations. and just like different individual personalities have different strengths and weaknesses and sometimes clash with each other and can learn from each other to grow stronger, smarter, wiser and kinder, the same is true of entire cultures. right now none of my favorite fiction series are rationalist or rational fics at all. the one I love most is "the Dark and Day" series by Jacob Israel Gray, which is about a world where half of it is a high tech scifi society of endless night and the other half is a high magic fantasy society of endless day. and theyre in a cold war with each other. and the hero is a kid who lives near the border between them who ends up caught in the middle.

as I see it, the problem with rationalists isn't mere stupidity. its insanity and not caring enough to listen to others. doesn't matter how many brain cells they have nor how many synapses if all those brain cells and synapses are filled with crap. as the programmers say, "garbage in, garbage out". the irony that this criticism of rationalists is the exact same one they level against literally everyone else is not lost on me lol.

thanks! :)

Less wrong has a bunch of the little diamonds you find on a flowchart, and the promise that you can assemble a flow chart out of them.

I'd rather not say my previous usernames. There were a lot of horribly embarrassing and stupid things I've said over the years before I learned how to actually understand people and relate to them. I will spare you all the pain of that. I was quite active in the SSC community. It wasn't as bad as LessWrong, but it wasn't all that much of an improvement either. At least SSC, unlike LessWrong, applies their analytical and research skills in useful ways which produce useful insights that are applicable in the real world without needing to memorize a long gish gallop of epistemic crutches. And they don't constantly obsess over AI like LessWrong does. SSC does have a lot of the same problem of being jerks and being really insensitive and obnoxious to those they consider outsiders. But at least they are willing to argue with outsiders more than Less Wrong is. Less Wrong's attitude towards outsiders is more like "they're mind-killed lunatics don't encourage them! well kept gardens die by pacifism and we have more important things to be doing". Because of this the LessWrong community is even more closed off than SSC, regardless of how easy it is to set up an account on their website.

Read the Sequences.

I'm 27.

honestly? it depends on how you look at it I think. from what I hear a LOT of silicon valley tech types read rationalist/less wrong material. less wrong is super focused on AI safety research at the exclusion of most other things (meaning they spend all day doing useless math/logic puzzles which don't actually make sense and aren't really applicable in the real world). a lot of rationalists also focus a lot on the "effective altruism" movement, which is supposed to be about making the most positive impact for a particular amount of money or time donated. of course the main issue with that is that civilization itself is made of relationships, and a small minority of people trying to optimize how they spend their time and money for maximum impact does not at all build a healthy and sustainable civilization. if someone wants to spend their money on something trivial then the person who sold them that trivial thing has the money now and then they can choose to spend it on helping people instead. "effective altruists" treat money as if its a scarce natural resource that can be used up even though that isn't actually true. they try to take all the responsibility for everything on their shoulders instead of sharing it. and yet the way they try to do that is mostly just by moving money around (or convincing someone else to move money around), or writing blog posts or research papers about stuff like AI or about "effective altruist" charities. i mean don't get me wrong, having lots of money redirected to things like direct cash relief for poor people in Africa or for their healthcare and protecting them from mosquitoes etc. is a worthy kind of goal. but thats basically like funneling water into a leaky bathtub due to the geopolitical conditions that produced that extreme poverty in the first place. and their more ambitious "save the world" types of projects strike me as mostly useless money sinks. TLDR: **so in terms of their influence i think they're basically a black hole for the most part. they suck up lots of money and time and power and then it disappears into the void. most of their actual long term impact IMO is just that they made silicon valley tech people just a little bit more cautious in their quest to follow automation off a cliff.** rationalists are overly analytical hair-splitting "logic and reason" jerks living in a civilization whose institutions and infrastructure often don't respect or value imagination or intuition or personal experience, only numbers and data and "peer reviewed research studies" blah blah blah. otherwise i don't think anybody important would ever listen to them. TLDR: **i think their staying power will probably last until certain kinds of things happen like:** —society starts noticing all the other simple and scalable methods that can be used as foundations for infrastructure and institutions besides the scientific one. i.e. the Deming cycle *(Management method)* discovered by Prof. William Deming in the 1950's, or the Four Writing Personas *(Brainstorming method)* discovered by Betty Sue Flowers in 1997. there are seriously a freaking ton of such methods. my brother and I both thought of a couple of them ourselves. and most people can only name ONE. —enough people start getting their collective crap together enough in their countries and local areas that people start to notice that "science logic and reason" isn't everything. or maybe they even notice that while foundational methods like the scientific method are helpful, they aren't the end all be all and should not be overly relied on nor used for every single decision one makes. i think once enough people start noticing and talking about obvious common sense stuff like that, rationalists will be left behind.

more like astro-poots

Ha good example of the rationalist method described above, not reading and dismissing out of hand. Quality parody 5/7.