Not a sneer, but good to see some awareness of others looking at the whole phenomenon. Hope it helps some people.

From the article:

I will never forget hearing a Rationalist friend ask a non-Rationalist friend whether he loved riding motorcycles because it was an experiment in social status, rather than, y’know, vroom vroom fun thing go fast.

(okay, the article has a few sneerworthy phrases)

No Rationalist has ever said, to my knowledge, that you shouldn’t write poetry, but a few Rationalists have told me that they feel like they shouldn’t make weird art because it’s dumb and un-Rationalist to do so

Imagine reasoning yourself out of one of the fundamental experiences of being human. This is why Rationalists are usually nutty.

In the EA community, one toxic norm is something like, “don’t ever indulge in Epicurean style, and never, ever stop thinking about your impact on the world.”

Can anyone share context on this? Are EA proponents big on asceticism?

I guess that follows naturally from maximal utilitarianism, but I’m curious about what the norm looks like in practice

One must imagine the serene Yogi seized with crippling shame over their perfectly normal road rage.

Is road rage actually a normal experience? Like the kind of thing that makes people yell to themselves or get out of the car and threaten somebody. I haven’t felt rage when people cut me off or turn in front of me or whatever. It’s like a mild “what a moron” amusement (people love watching /r/IdiotsInCars). New driver FWIW.

One sign of toxic social norms is if your behavior does deviate from the standard, you feel that the only way of saving face is through explaining your behavior via the group values. Like, if you watch the Bachelor all the time, and one of your smart peers finds out about that, you might find yourself hastily explaining that the series is enjoyable to you as an applied experiment in evolutionary psychology, when, in fact, you just like social drama because watching humans freak out is fun.

Overall pretty nice piece from the author. It’s not their point, but I also think that norms can be bad because of their affect on the world, not just on the individual. So norms that justify even the worst /r/TheMotte pseudoscience are also bad, and they work the same way. I am a rationalist, therefore everything I do is rational once questioned.

Am I a post-Rat? Wasn’t aware that I wasn’t supposed to have explicit principles…

I’m not mentioning these communities because I think they’re extra toxic or anything, by the way. They’re probably less toxic than the average group,

uhhh huh

The intentional development of toxic social norms is otherwise known as founding a cult

I don’t think intention is a necessary ingredient. People with god complexes and lackeys who follow them are though

“Rationality is cool” becomes “Rationalist and Rationalist-flavored stuff is a better use of your time than anything else” becomes “it’s uncool if you want to spend a lot of time doing stuff that has nothing to do with testable beliefs, or our favorite issues.” This is all unintentional and implicit.

IDK, but I feel this is far more explicit than it is implicit. Making any decision “Rationally”, with specific “Bayesian” probabilities, is an explicit goal, thus Rationalism must pervade every aspect of your life.

I also think the word “nerdy” is being used as a stand in for “on the spectrum”. If not, specifically mentioning autism spectrum, and how it impairs the ability to process emotional and social queues, really ought to be factored in to the analysis. Many of the things he mentions imply a difficulty in intuitively processing the presence or absence of certain social queues or dynamics.

Butterfly meme “is this… scrupulosity?”