(Not sure if this should be tagged NSFW or not. I’ve lurked but I’m not quite sure where the line is. I’m tagging it because this isn’t a straight up sneer.)

Will Wilkinson is, as I understand it, formerly rationalist/adjacent.

Now, I’ve come to think that people who really care about getting things right are a bit misguided when they focus on methods of rational cognition. I’m thinking of the so-called “rationalist” community here. If you want an unusually high-fidelity mental model of the world, the main thing isn’t probability theory or an encyclopedic knowledge of the heuristics and biases that so often make our reasoning go wrong. It’s learning who to trust. That’s really all there is to it. That’s the ballgame.

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If they seem to have a taste for mavericks, idiosyncratic bomb-throwers, and thorns in the side of the establishment, it ought to count against them. That’s a sign of ideologues, provocateurs, and book-sale/click maximizers. Beyond prudent conservative alignment with consensus, expert identification is a “humanistic” endeavor, a “soft skill.” A solid STEM education isn’t going to help you and “critical thinking” classes will help less than you’d think. It’s about developing a bullshit detector — a second sense for the subtle sophistry of superficially impressive people on the make. Collecting people who are especially good at identifying trustworthiness and then investing your trust in them is our best bet for generally being right about things.

It seems to me that the rationalist community is primarily drawn from those who have generally rejected the consensus view of society. One might even note that this is essentially “on the tin”, in that the claim is that society as a whole is rife with irrational bias. We can also note the general obsession with finding idiosyncratic sources to be trusted, as exemplified by the idea of “super-predictors” attaining a somewhat mythical aura.

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Evangelical Christianity teaches people to trust their feelings and the pastoral charisma of hucksters out to get ahead by validating their prejudices — not so different from Marianne Williamson California guru woo. Over time, this became the default epistemology of the American right. Meanwhile, Conservatism Inc. has for decades cultivated distrust in our most reliable and authoritative sources of accurate information — academics, the New York Times, etc. — in an effort to keep their base unified around and agitated by a polarized, highly mobilizing worldview that is, at best, tenuously related to reality. This propaganda shaped and reinforced the political and cultural assumptions of white evangelicals, which worked their way into the content of their weird syncretic Christianity thanks to the grifty, emotive, self-indulgence of their increasingly fused religious/political culture

It’s hardly surprising that the rationalist community has drifted further and further towards a synchronous orbit with the libertarians, the cranks and the various “race realists” of the far right.