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Where Are All the Successful Rationalists?

92 points by jeffreyrogers 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
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whoisburbansky 6y ago
The quote at the end of the article about computers being for community, not insight, resonates well with me, especially given where this is posted right now. I also empathize with the author's take on reading rationalist literature basically making me feel less alone rather than helping develop any kind of special insight or skill at winning anything, really.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Tyler Cowen once called rationalism “just another kind of religion”, but if so, it seems to be a fairly unsuccessful one. it's much worse, it's basically self-help or Oprah for nerds, religion at least has some spiritual value. I honestly don't know how anyone can tolerate that stuff, it ranges from cringe inducing harry potter fan fiction to bad takes on AI. One of the worst things I've experienced working in software development is that there's way too many people who keep sending me these blog posts.
- deleted 6y ago
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btilly 6y ago
There are lots of successful rationalists. As an example, Objectivists generally accept the label of being rationalists. And the people at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_Ayn_Rand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_A... came under the influence of Objectivism before they were successful. Some of the more prominent names on that list include Mark Cuban (Sharktank), Alan Greenspan (economist), Penn Gillette (magician), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek), Peter Thiel (Paypal), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). And those are just ones who publicly talked about it. How many more achieved success but didn't choose to talk about it?
- luckylion 6y ago
  Somebody who was influenced by somebody who generally accepts the label X doesn't really fit the definition of X, do they? They might, but they might also just like capitalism because it does well for them and find it enjoyable when somebody tells them "and you know what? you're not just lucky, you're right".
- trenchgun 6y ago
  The article is talking about this rationalism: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There are successful objectivists, but objectitivm is very different from "lesswrong rationalism". Moreso though, I take issue with this : >came under the influence of objectivism before they were successful Not only are there people in that list that were successful since before they were born, but the condition you cite is not necessary to be in that list. You can have been influenced by Rand as a teenager, grown out of it by the time you became successful, and still be in that list, and you can also be part of that list if you were influence by it after becoming successful. Also, objectivism is objectively incorrect, and unlike rationalism is an anti-materialist ideology.
  - mountainb 6y ago
    To whit, Ayn Rand's novels are massive best-sellers, and many other Rand acolytes like Nathaniel Branden also published massive best-sellers. Out of their readers, there are many, many, many total losers and mediocrities. That list is cherry picking given that most of the names on that list do not even pay dues to the Ayn Rand Institute and could not be considered card carrying Objectivists. There have been many successful card carrying Objectivists, but claiming that everyone who read "The Fountainhead" derived their success from Ayn Rand in some way is just silly.
waterhouse 6y ago
Answer: Too busy being successful to spend time writing things on the internet to make themselves visible to you as rationalists? (Similar to the classic idea that, to a first approximation, the only people with enough free time to attend Mensa meetups are those who haven't been otherwise successful.) This overlaps with some of the supplied answers.
- genericone 6y ago
  That was a pretty good Mensa burn, hadn't heard until today and I just got a good chuckle. It's the corollary to the same burn against teachers, but punching Up instead of Down. For those who don't know the phrase: Those who can't do, teach. And to go further, the derogatory phrase means if you can't make money doing something, you could still make money teaching other people to do it.
  - boredumb 6y ago
    > punching Up instead of Down Are you implying Mensa holds more "institutional" power than teachers?
    - genericone 6y ago
      Good catch, I suppose I see them as more 'Up' because of the perceived narcissism and the very real 98th percentile IQ membership requirement, the 2%, so to speak.
matthewdgreen 6y ago
Every third phrase in the article is inscrutable, and understanding it requires that I click through and read a 2,000-word Scott Alexander post. So I’m going to go out on a limb and offer a hypothesis to answer the post’s main question: rationalists are prevented from being successful in normal endeavors because they’re too busy trading weird in-group language and parsing encyclopediae of inefficiently-organized exposition transmitted via blog post.
- Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  I think the underlying issue is that rationalists are wanna-be intellectuals: they want fancy-sounding jargon, but without the rigorous intellectual hard-work to back it up. (Not that most jargon is good in an academic context either, but at least there you can kinda see why it’s sometimes necessary) (The other reason might be because rationalism, at least recently, has been adjacent to crackpot racist phrenology ideas, and so has driven away contributions from most of the world, preventing them from branching out into the real world)
  - thotsBgone 6y ago
    I think they tend to use a lot of fancy jargon because the jargon is actually really good, and there's no real replacement for it without circumlocution.
    - boredumb 6y ago
      I'm not even sure if it was intended, but I chuckled reading the word `circumlocution`.
  - tyre 6y ago
    On the other hand, maybe some people are interested in a type of reading/writing but that doesn't mean they could do it themselves. Like last night I watched the writer Jia Tolentino interview Chanel Miller (the woman who was raped by Brock Turner, if you're familiar with the case.) Watching Jia think in real time is magical to me. Her writing, too, is at times incisive, at others deeply personal, sometimes indignant or marveling or both, and can still pull back to culture/society level relevance. I would say that the best of Jia's longform writing is among the best narrative non-fiction being written today. Is there a part of me that wants to be able to do that? i.e. am I a wannabe? I mean, kind of, but I also really enjoy it and that's more the point. I enjoy Ren Hang's photography but am not trying to be a photographer. I enjoy helping founders but don't have much desire to found another company. We don't _have_ to assume that everyone who enjoys something only says that they do because they are status-obsessed and lazy. EDIT: Another example I would give is Daniel Day Lewis. Good god the length he goes to to method act; the almost terrifying commitment. And it fucking pays off. But do I want that life? Hell no. Because I'm lazy? Maybe if I wanted that life then work ethic would be a question, but what disqualifies my trying to be Daniel Day Lewis in the first place is that I don't want to make the trade-offs he does — even if I could.
gerikson 6y ago
> Pope Clement VII was so influential that King Henry VIII had to leave the church and invent in Anglicanism just to escape. This is so amazingly reductive I can't take anything else in the post seriously.
- defen 6y ago
  "Explain the English Reformation in one sentence" is a pretty tall order, but it seems reasonable to wonder whether Clement VII would have allowed the annulment if Catherine of Aragon's nephew hadn't just sacked Rome and taken Clement prisoner.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    The geography and logistics were wrong for either a successful covert assassination misson or installing/supporting an anti-pope to oust for one. The reason Anglicism lasted was because it was a large island such that it was hard to both have a navy capable of overcoming it, raising an army large enough to defeat it, and transport said large army after the naval fight. Anglicism was a branch born of cynical political power struggles and everyone knows it.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Oddly, I feel compelled to defend that bit of glibness. Sure, the Pope vetoed the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage because he was under extreme pressure to do so and Henry VIII left the Catholic Church out of frustration with this rather than anything resembling sympathy for what became the English Reformation, but the point was the Church's stance on being above worldly politics was borne out of being so integral to worldly politics they needed excuses. It'd be great for the rationalist movement if their leading figures were so influential on business, politics and actually existent AI they had to feign disinterest in them I guess the flip side of that argument also lives in British politics: the PM's advisor Dominic Cummings, who fulfils a Rasputin-like role of being on the one hand a magnet for criticism and on the other hand someone the PM will go to unprecedented extremes to continue to receive advice from[1]. He's also someone that has Overcoming Bias and Yudowsky in his short blogroll and sniggers at his detractors that "don't understand epistemological uncertainty" when his comments that his priorities "in some possible branches of the future... will be an error" get media attention. An archetypal 'rationalist' who is incidentally currently the UK's most influential policy wonk. [1]Usually British PMs don't accept their Chancellor's resignation so their adviser can fire his staff, or refrain from firing advisers whose actions become the #1 subject of public outcry from their core voter base.
kneel 6y ago
Rationalists tend to be irrational people who need help. No doubt there are some good thinkers in the sphere, but I don't know why you'd correlate rationalists with 'success'
- elevenoh 6y ago
  >Rationalists tend to be irrational people who need help. wot..
  - Veen 6y ago
    I suppose an analogy is that the most puritanically religious are often those who feel most inclined to sin. Your average sinner doesn't feel the need to go full-on zealot to keep to the straight and narrow.
    - emiliobumachar 6y ago
      Scott Alexander: "A Christian proverb says: “The Church is not a country club for saints, but a hospital for sinners”. Likewise, the rationalist community is not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions, it’s a dojo for people learning to resist them." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi...
afiodorov 6y ago
I have been heavily influenced by lesswrong. After the initial stage of encorporating the rationality identity and arguing about everything with everyone, I tried becoming more of an applied rationalist when I realised the first approch isn't leading me to winning anything. Shortly after I read: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-happy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-... I made a series of life changes. I can't attribute the blog post alone to these changes, but it was something that pushed me towards a more meaningful life. I stopped spending money on things and started buying experiences more often. I bought a bycicle (a thing but gives you many experiences) and started cycling to/from work in an effort to a) exercise b) spend more time outside. I broke up with my girlfriend of 9 years because I figured it just wasn't making me any happier. Cycling in London, UK for years made me very satisfied but I also got tired of the climate and I ended up finding a remote role and relocating to a climate where I can be outside every day. Finally I have started strength training - and now I am in a much better shape after doing it on a regular basis for a few years. It's hard to say that I am happier exactly, but there is a sense of liberty I feel that is hard to describe. The life I am living feels like my own, I feel the sense of control and I am liberated. I would like to think many of these things count as "winning".
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I've treated lesswrong as a way to still make terrible choices, just by expressing bias in more complex thinking, which hides it better and makes us feel batter when we still experience the same outcomes.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    how would you judge the choices you have made? what would be a better choice, and how would you know it was better?
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      Poorly, because hindsight is hard, I just would skip the steps related to hiding my biases behind overly precise numbers.
lanstin 6y ago
I'm basing this more on friendships with libertarians than the article (tho I did read it, if not get the meaning); people are not rationality engines; reason is at the behest of emotions; reason is even often used to back-fill explanations for decisions made by the weighing of various neural networks for reasons concrete but obscure. Success for humans certainly is increased by an ability to reason well (quickly or slowly, depending on the field), but even more so on being able to motivate or persuade other humans; even technically, my success at learning complicated stuff is less being able to code and fix systems, but more at being able to consistently and correctly explain the complicated stuff and the logical consequences of the complicated stuff in meetings. I force myself to keep programming because I need to keep that understanding alive, but companies would be happy to have me just explaining stuff. And the people I've enjoyed working for the most are able to create a warm feeling of we are all in it together making cool new technologies! Yay we are making the internet! Pump up the feelings so we are motivated to use reason to solve problems in the path.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  I've seen the claim that reason is just emotional rationalization before. It strikes me as dreadfully cynical. Rationalizing one's emotions is the entire point of life. We experience something, it confuses us, we try to figure it out and explain it, model it so that we can better predict in the future. In other words, it's called "understanding". Understanding is a good thing, not a bad thing. I think the criticism is better and more narrowly targeted toward those that don't prioritize consistency. Yes, from your experiences and emotions, try to derive (or infer, rather) your principles. That's fine! But then, don't stop there. From there, try to remain consistent with those principles. And if they conflict, use that emotional experience to again understand and update your principles and then try to remain consistent with those.
  - lanstin 6y ago
    Reason is not only or solely emotional rationalization, my point was that in the substrate of the brain, emotions are the motivator for our actions and long term patterns. You can't understand your self in completeness, at least so far. We are all just too complicated. There may be pieces you understand about your typical reactions and preferences, but like why do I like organ music and my wife hates it? Why do I love spicy curries and others don't? Very complex answers if any exist to these questions, much less why do I prefer a group decision making with a bit of arguing and a bit of time to mull over the answers? I don't derive or infer principles, I try to live up to principles, to squeeze something important into a few words so I can more often do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing. I certainly have emotions that are never going to be made into principles - I have even gotten so angry that I wished ill towards others, tho I cannot recommend the desire to harm others as beneficial for own happiness, the others well being, or society as a whole. For me the point of life is closer to building satisfying emotional experiences and connections, to people and to an great on-going work; to do good and heal harm; to enjoy each day's beauty. Those things are what make my reason work well. When I'm scheming in anger, my brain is less proficient at reason. When I'm walking under the pulsing Mars and mulling over some terraform issue, I'm a veritable fountain of rationality, which none the less cannot explain the happiness I feel when I return to the family after the walk. If you think you can come up with a reason to do one thing rather than another that is not based on something isomorphic to emotional drives, I wish good luck to you but I cannot have much hope in the likelihood of success.
gog-ma-gog 6y ago
Rationalists seem extremely common amongst the $300k+/year software engineers I know. If that isn’t “successful”, then I’m not sure we’re using the same word anymore. You can argue that the causal arrow doesn’t point in the right direction—that is, that people that are successful just happen to wear the affectation of “rationalist” because that happens to be fashionable, and not that their rationalism led them to a “successful” career, but that doesn’t seem to hold up against scrutiny, in my experience. Of those that I personally know, most have been engaged with the community since at least the golden days of lesswrong.
- darawk 6y ago
  I think this is exactly right. Being successful in the top 0.1% is not actually rational. Even if you're brilliant, your chance of succeeding at that level is low. A truly rational person seeks out the best risk-adjusted return, not the best absolute return. If you're a technical minded person, making 300k/year in a software job is about the best risk-adjusted return of any profession I can think of.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Well the risk is you have to move to the US to get that kind of salary in a software job.
    - klipt 6y ago
      And the cost of living is so high that despite the fantastic salary most software engineers in Silicon Valley will never buy a house there. Great place to make money before retiring elsewhere though.
    - edanm 6y ago
      Well yes, but many other countries have similar math when it comes to software engineering salaries as opposed to other fields. In most places, going into software is a good thing to do moneywise.
      - 6y ago
elevenoh 6y ago
Are rationalists less likely to enter the pool of candidates endeavouring for wide-publicly-visible 'success' due to them noting the low probability of success reality - (and the discomforting fact that this arguably arises out of factors beyond one's control/foresight)? Entering this pool arguably requires a touch of useful delusion (e.g. trump).
js8 6y ago
I don't think just rationality cuts it, you need a goal. For example, I see many MBAs being rational in their relentless focus on efficiency. Yet, this is reactive (to the market), it doesn't follow any value in itself. To attempt to do something that nobody did before, or even to pursue a certain value above other, is inherently irrational. Yanis Varoufakis told a nice story about him teaching game theory. At the beginning of the semester, he offered the class a free pass of the course: Each student would write down the grade they would want and they would all be awarded by the minimal grade that was proposed. But first, they would have to agree on this proposal. He mentions that there always was a person who refused to agree. When he asked them, why did they were against it, they responded, without a hint of irony, there would surely be some idiot that would write down a low grade (and they would not pass). Frankly, I don't think this problem has a rational solution. It's a paradox - by being totally rational, you're being irrational. And I think the same is true for rationalism as a life philosophy. If you apply it to everything, the life will be hollow.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  This is a very good point. Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system, and all value systems are inherently irrational. It manifests in philopshy as the "is-ought" problem.
  - dbtc 6y ago
    Actually I think the value system of rationality is based on the (arguably irrational) belief in the supremacy of rationality. This is an ahumanist or post-humanist value system. Rationalism becomes a movement of transcendence from mortality, fleshly desires, the unconscious, and nature. The rationalist worships the neural network.
  - chrchang523 6y ago
    Rationality is about internal consistency of beliefs and values. "Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system" strikes me as a category error. Giving you a value system isn't its job; instead, it provides a toolbox for identifying and resolving contradictions in your preexisting beliefs and values. (Since we all work with imperfect information about the world, internal consistency is far from a guarantee of accuracy; but it improves the odds.)
HONEST_ANNIE 6y ago
Why I Am Not A Technocrat by E. Glen Weyl https://blog.radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/2019-08-19-bv61r6/ https://blog.radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/2019-08-19-bv61r6...
- darawk 6y ago
  This is a great post, and i'm a huge fan of Glen Weyl, but Glen Weyl is the biggest purveyor of illegible-to-nontechnical-people technocratic ideas i've ever seen. I think his ideas are great and interesting, but I don't really understand on what level he views himself as separate and distinct from the rest of technocracy.
duxup 6y ago
I'm not generally into whatever scene this article is all about, but this seems like a sort of a down the philosophical rabbit hole that maybe has too little data or not a lot to do with 'success'? Maybe there's not enough rationalists to decide or maybe we don't know how many folks are rationalists or not so we can't answer the question? Or success has nothing to do with being a rationalist or not? Or 'success' isn't easily defined / observed? This seems like measuring something that I'm not sure you can measure, or tell if it matters or not.
screye 6y ago
My hypothesis: Rationalists are the opposite of visionaries. A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your hobbies is success. It is also more reliably achievable. A rationalist thrives in the absence of uncertainty. Becoming a decent engineer is a far more reliable way to be successful than starting the next billion dollar company. That is practically leaving everything up to luck. The truth is, we only see two kinds of successful people in media. The lucky, the pig-headed visionary and those who fall in line. Rationalists are by ideology averse to luck, stubbornness and compliance. Go figure, why they do not feature in cohorts so opposed to their core ideology. Now militant rationalists are rarely rationalists. If anything, acknowledging the virtue of gut feeling/intuition in presence of uncertainty and the the prevalence of uncertainty in everything we do, are the 2 most evident facts of our universe. To make a strong claim of correctness in the presence of massive uncertainty, is innately irrational. That being said, a lot of the most successful people I've met, use various tools of rationalism quite frequently.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  That's me to a T. I was a "militant rationalist" as it were, back in high school. Anyone remember talk.origins?
  - spiritplumber 6y ago
    it's no longer around? talkorigins.org seems to work
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      I was referring more to the newsgroup than the archives site, but I used past tense because I haven't been a regular there in almost two decades now. [1] https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins
  - cecilpl2 6y ago
    Yes, I spent a lot of time there and on the JREF forums.
praptak 6y ago
"How to Solve It" by Polya is a great book about general techniques for solving hard math problems. It also contains a warning: "[...]if we're not careful, the next generation of students will be able to talk the hind leg off a donkey about the thought-processes involving in solving problems but will be able to operate only at a very low level in terms of content." My (admittedly untestable or at least hard to test) hypothesis is that people who identify themselves as rationalists fell into this trap.
- goostavos 6y ago
  It's an easy trap to fall into. Reading and thinking about how you'll think when you need to solve that hard problem is waaaay easier than actually solving the hard problem. Plus, you get this little bonus of still feeling like your doing something productive -- "I'm just sharpening the axe really quick." Meanwhile, no actual work is done.
nafey 6y ago
Counterpoint: a lot of successful people who do not claim the mantle of rationalism are infact rationalists.
ggm 6y ago
Secular Humanists > Rationalists. The Rationalists can get into difficult corners. Rationally, the way to fix many problems is de-humanising.
- fullshark 6y ago
  I'd rather be a rationalizationist, they've never been wrong once.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Certainly, convincing rationalists their rationality is based on skewed evidence and false reasoning is hard. I try to ration my time investment on this, rationalising that I will gain more by doing less. Which is in it's own way, the Zen outcome: rationally, we're all dead for a long time so, why bother? Postscript: rationalisationism is post-hoc reasoning. I did take the last cookie, now, think of a justification why it's OK.. working in children's brains since the invention of the cookie jar.
  - screye 6y ago
    Genius ! Got a good chuckle out of me.
dbtc 6y ago
If something ends in 'ist' or 'ism' it probably isn't rational. But then, perfect rationality is only possible if you can keep the irrational aspects of the universe out of your personal reality...
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  Scientist. Humanitarianism. Orthodontist. Egalitarianism. Industrialist. Magnetism. Psychologist. Stoicism. Virologist. Capitalism. Neurologist. Formalism. I could list dozens more.
  - dbtc 6y ago
    list ;)
jerf 6y ago
The problem is the competition is much better than anticipated. Human irrationality is greatly overstated, because people conflate being bad at explaining why they are doing something with doing something irrational. Humans aren't anywhere near as irrational as portrayed. If they were, they'd be dead. Not just, like, dying today, but dead long ago, and you'd have never been born, because humans would just be dead. Reality does not permit high degrees of irrationality to survive very long. To listen to some people describe it, humans are beings who, when presented with a choice between a cookie now or two cookies in 15 minutes, choose to gouge their eyes out. Rationality studies aren't going to rewire a fundamentally crazy, irrational person into a rational one that is suddenly the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Rationality studies can only clean up some of the rough edges on a being that fundamentally behaves fairly rationally most of the time. There isn't anywhere near as much room for optimization as some people seem to think. And part of the reason for this is, it is very difficult to overstate how bad humans are at explaining why they are doing something. Just, mind-blowingly bad. Study after study reinforces the endless parade of anecdotes from my own life. Everything agrees; people are terrible at this. But, the thing is... doing the rational thing for the wrong reason, or without any reason at all, is still doing the rational thing. Jodie may gossip terribly about Ethel for all sorts of reasons our calm, collected putative "rationalists" declare to be "irrational", and Jodie herself may think she's doing it because Ethel is ugly and smells bad and just pissed her off yesterday, but nevertheless, the goal Jodie doesn't even consciously know she has is likely to be attained, and Jodie's access to better mates is likely to be successfully increased at Ethel's expense. (Not "guaranteed", but likely enough that, well, this strategy has been around since the dawn of recorded history and is still going strong for a reason, you know?) A good chunk of the remaining belief about human irrationality will come from people who aren't clearly looking at the world, and will declare on one level or another that that's an irrational thing for Jodie to want... but... goals are much less amenable to "rationality" than means. That you personally think Jodie shouldn't want that, or shouldn't need to want that, or whatever, doesn't change the fact that Jodie is operating on that goal, and really quite rationally pursuing it. That said, there is room for improvement. But I don't think it's the sort of improvement that leads to fame and visibility very often; it's life improvement. Nobody's famous for really having their life together, and making good decisions. But there are still plenty of people who are better at it and plenty who are worse, and even if there isn't as much room as some people may think to improve that, there's still plenty to make it worthwhile.
deleted 6y ago
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mistidoi 6y ago
Funny typo: 'The LSD has an estimated $5B in annual revenue". :)
- dllthomas 6y ago
  I assumed it was a Star Trek reference.
CydeWeys 6y ago
I can by no means claim to be as knowledgeable on any of this stuff as the post's author is, but my take on this has always been that rationalism is a philosophical view, and thus, it's really not clear why you'd think it should lead to great material success given that philosophers in the modern world tend not to achieve said great success. I am personally enthralled by philosophy and I'd also consider myself a rationalist (and have spent a decent amount of time reading SSC), but I'm unable to draw any sort of putative causal connection between that and being very successful. Indeed, delving into this stuff is what I do to screw around, so pretty much exactly the opposite.
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
I was very involved with the Less Wrong community starting when it was the joint Overcoming Bias blog between Yudkowski and Hanson through the splinter off and into the formation of MIRI (fmr: Singularity institute) around 2008-2011 or so. I think it comes down to a few factors. 1. Deep Learning took off and took the narrative as the "right path" to "General AI." Back in its heyday all the LW folks (including myself) were really focused on approaching AI from the perspective of Pearl's Causality and the work of Ray Solomonoff 2. There were no practical products, tools, frameworks or research that came out of that group that could either be easily applied to existing business or demonstrated SOTA on any computing domain. 3. AGI/GAI/HLAI/etc... is generally still (unfairly IMO) seen as the domain for cranks and zealots - which was the primary end-goal of the LW crowd, where "rationality" was the practical middle-step. 4. It kind of turned into a mini-cult around Yudkowski, which IMO turned people off [0] https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/
- Verdex 6y ago
  > It kind of turned into a mini-cult around Yudkowski I think this transformation had already happened when I first heard of rationalists. Some of the things that they were saying seemed vaguely interesting. But I couldn't quite put my finger on something being off. At some point I came to the conclusion that Yudkowski was some sort of cult leader like figure. A cult around rational thinking. Isn't that something. Then later tiger king came out and I realized that apparently everything can devolve into forming cults.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Humans can turn (almost) anything/anyone into a tribal fetish.
- mordymoop 6y ago
  The rationalist community and the number of people who call themselves rationalists has actually grown enormously (exponentially, in fact) since those early days. Modern rationalists exist in all walks of life. The early Yudkowsky-centered rationalist movement is a historical, not a modern depiction.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Because rationalism is more about not taking avoidable losses by frankly being stupid than producing outliers by doing something normally stupid or crazy that pays off and get noticed. Nobody pays attention to the 999 times someone prays for rain and fails but the 1 time it does and it called "working a miracle". That sort of selection bias is in play here but worse as they ignore the background yields of regularly applied rationalism. Not to mention the projection involved - "success" is easy to come by if you have a crowd of rubes paying for what they want to believe but rationalism doesn't offer anything with such popular appeal directly. Really the whole article is anti-intellectualism fallacies strung together in a "If where the rays of the sun don't create gold why aren't you rich!" style fallacious retort.
Matticus_Rex 6y ago
I run into successful rationalists all the time in the business world. They might not self-label (I don't, though I acknowledge that the sequences have drastically changed my life), but we're definitely in the demo he's talking about. Yes, there may be some selection bias, but I know for a fact that the way I'm able to contribute at work has quite a bit to do with things I've learned from the rationalist community. It definitely improves things to work some of the relevant lingo into your work environment so you can more easily help colleagues grok why the perspective you have on a topic seems very different, and I can see an argument that in many areas you'd be better off with specific knowledge. But is that the trade-off? Not in my experience. You can have both, or at least 80% of both.
motohagiography 6y ago
Funding your companies, advising your executives and politicians, building your products, and smack talking on HN. It is a funny question though. I might posit that it's not a philosophy so much as a subculture that appreciates a certain flavour of writing. There's a form, like a prog-rock anthem or a minimalist piece, where writers ourselves tend to appreciate it, but where most people are just looking for something to dance to. If I could characterize most of the criticism I've read of rationalist writing, it would be that their main complaint is they can't dance to it.
yaacov 6y ago
How about Dominic Cummings? I don’t like the guy, but he clearly thinks of himself as a rationalist and has been extremely successful.
Tomminn 6y ago
Rationalism is hydrofluoric acid. It silently creeps inside you and hollows out essential parts of you when you thought it was just a tool helpful for dissolving some external problem. You start with a problem, and instead of solving the problem, you end up just losing your desire for the solution. It's our nature to be self obsessed. So when we learn a new way of thinking, we cannot help but make ourselves the primary target of it. And nothing will disabuse you of a deeply held, arational, intensely motivational heroic narrative like the tools of rationalism.
ggggtez 6y ago
I have no idea what this guy is talking about to be honest. I can't really discern even what claim they are trying to disprove in this 10 year old blog post by another author referencing another discussion that I don't have background on.
anm89 6y ago
Where are the successful philosophers in general? His opening complaint is that the most successful rationalist philosophers are stuck in academic philosophy and then goes on to name the only modern philosophers I've ever heard of. Academic philosophy has long been a circle jerk that occasionally in a moment of triumphant success becomes useful as a side note to something in AI research or whatever. I mean, when was the last time that an academic philosophy paper made it to the front page of HN?( which is probably the most receptive mainstream audience that is ever going to exist for something like that)
gweinberg 6y ago
I think most super-successful people have taken gambles that were apriori foolish but ended up paying off. People who behave more or less rationally may not get the big jackpots, but they get a lot of small wins and avoid most catastrophes.
biolurker1 6y ago
The post talks like rationalism is a choice someone makes. It's not though.
sergefaguet 6y ago
I personally know at least one rationalist who is amongst the wealthiest people in the world and got there at least in part as a direct consequence of his rationalist interests, uses the lingo etc. (No, I won’t say who it is) That being said most people who self-identify as rationalists are significantly held back by (a) lack of charisma (b) the fact that they believe that their elaborate mental constructs are reality. Of course these are just another mental narrative, and not even a particularly useful one.
dkarl 6y ago
Of course analyzing arguments logically is a valuable skill, but here's the thing: the educational preparation for fields where rational thinking is most valuable is already chock full of opportunities to practice and refine rational thinking. After years of practice, what further marginal gains can be made by further analysis and study of the skill itself? Isn't it overwhelmingly likely that a person with that background has other, more pressing weaknesses they can work on to promote their success? Unfortunately, the people who gravitate towards rationalism tend to be people who are already good at it and naturally oriented towards it, people who are more likely to lack the skill of turning it off. When somebody makes an argument to you, you want to think along with them, try to inhabit their head temporarily. You'll learn things about them that allow you to work productively with them and even understand the factual content of their speech better. If you're diagnosing the logical structure of their irrationality while they speak, it's going to knock you out of their headspace, like spotting plot holes in a movie takes you out of the film. You've spotted something invalidating, and now you have to wrestle your brain back into paying attention. I would wager that the best movie critics aren't generally elite at spotting continuity errors. Learning to turn critical distance on and off, and to direct it where you need it to go (focusing on emotional dynamics, for instance, instead of logical structure,) is probably the skill that many people attracted to rationalism really need, but by doubling down on rationalism they're making it even more automatic. That aside, I think the fundamental question of the article is bizarre. Where are the successful "sprinters" in professional football? Speed is a critical factor for wide receivers and defensive backs, and they train for it, but they don't go around calling themselves sprinters or talking about sprint training in their press conferences. Speed is a skill and a quality for them, not an identity. Self-identifying as a "sprinter" would be counterproductive for a defensive back, because it takes one element of success and elevates it above the others instead of balancing it against them. It only makes sense if being a sprinter is more important to them than being successful as a defensive back, and you wouldn't imagine a person with that order of priorities to achieve elite success as a defensive back. As a skill and a quality, rather than an identity, rationalism might be common at the top of every field; who knows. That's a more interesting question at least.
tim333 6y ago
Some of the richest people in the world - I'm thinking Bezos, Gates and Buffett - are pretty rational even if they don't blog much.
oli5679 6y ago
Jeff Bezos seems to have a pretty rationalist philosophy, although he doesn't cite Yudkowsky. Gates and Musk seem to have aspects of it too. "I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried."[1] https://medium.com/@alyjuma/the-regret-minimization-framework-how-jeff-bezos-made-decisions-4d5a86deaf24 https://medium.com/@alyjuma/the-regret-minimization-framewor...

92 points by jeffreyrogers 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

The quote at the end of the article about computers being for community, not insight, resonates well with me, especially given where this is posted right now. I also empathize with the author's take on reading rationalist literature basically making me feel less alone rather than helping develop any kind of special insight or skill at winning anything, really.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Tyler Cowen once called rationalism “just another kind of religion”, but if so, it seems to be a fairly unsuccessful one. it's much worse, it's basically self-help or Oprah for nerds, religion at least has some spiritual value. I honestly don't know how anyone can tolerate that stuff, it ranges from cringe inducing harry potter fan fiction to bad takes on AI. One of the worst things I've experienced working in software development is that there's way too many people who keep sending me these blog posts.

deleted 6y ago
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btilly 6y ago

There are lots of successful rationalists. As an example, Objectivists generally accept the label of being rationalists. And the people at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_Ayn_Rand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_A... came under the influence of Objectivism before they were successful. Some of the more prominent names on that list include Mark Cuban (Sharktank), Alan Greenspan (economist), Penn Gillette (magician), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek), Peter Thiel (Paypal), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). And those are just ones who publicly talked about it. How many more achieved success but didn't choose to talk about it?

luckylion 6y ago
Somebody who was influenced by somebody who generally accepts the label X doesn't really fit the definition of X, do they? They might, but they might also just like capitalism because it does well for them and find it enjoyable when somebody tells them "and you know what? you're not just lucky, you're right".
trenchgun 6y ago
The article is talking about this rationalism: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong
sudosysgen 6y ago
There are successful objectivists, but objectitivm is very different from "lesswrong rationalism". Moreso though, I take issue with this : >came under the influence of objectivism before they were successful Not only are there people in that list that were successful since before they were born, but the condition you cite is not necessary to be in that list. You can have been influenced by Rand as a teenager, grown out of it by the time you became successful, and still be in that list, and you can also be part of that list if you were influence by it after becoming successful. Also, objectivism is objectively incorrect, and unlike rationalism is an anti-materialist ideology.
- mountainb 6y ago
  To whit, Ayn Rand's novels are massive best-sellers, and many other Rand acolytes like Nathaniel Branden also published massive best-sellers. Out of their readers, there are many, many, many total losers and mediocrities. That list is cherry picking given that most of the names on that list do not even pay dues to the Ayn Rand Institute and could not be considered card carrying Objectivists. There have been many successful card carrying Objectivists, but claiming that everyone who read "The Fountainhead" derived their success from Ayn Rand in some way is just silly.

waterhouse 6y ago

Answer: Too busy being successful to spend time writing things on the internet to make themselves visible to you as rationalists? (Similar to the classic idea that, to a first approximation, the only people with enough free time to attend Mensa meetups are those who haven't been otherwise successful.) This overlaps with some of the supplied answers.

genericone 6y ago
That was a pretty good Mensa burn, hadn't heard until today and I just got a good chuckle. It's the corollary to the same burn against teachers, but punching Up instead of Down. For those who don't know the phrase: Those who can't do, teach. And to go further, the derogatory phrase means if you can't make money doing something, you could still make money teaching other people to do it.
- boredumb 6y ago
  > punching Up instead of Down Are you implying Mensa holds more "institutional" power than teachers?
  - genericone 6y ago
    Good catch, I suppose I see them as more 'Up' because of the perceived narcissism and the very real 98th percentile IQ membership requirement, the 2%, so to speak.

matthewdgreen 6y ago

Every third phrase in the article is inscrutable, and understanding it requires that I click through and read a 2,000-word Scott Alexander post. So I’m going to go out on a limb and offer a hypothesis to answer the post’s main question: rationalists are prevented from being successful in normal endeavors because they’re too busy trading weird in-group language and parsing encyclopediae of inefficiently-organized exposition transmitted via blog post.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago
I think the underlying issue is that rationalists are wanna-be intellectuals: they want fancy-sounding jargon, but without the rigorous intellectual hard-work to back it up. (Not that most jargon is good in an academic context either, but at least there you can kinda see why it’s sometimes necessary) (The other reason might be because rationalism, at least recently, has been adjacent to crackpot racist phrenology ideas, and so has driven away contributions from most of the world, preventing them from branching out into the real world)
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  I think they tend to use a lot of fancy jargon because the jargon is actually really good, and there's no real replacement for it without circumlocution.
  - boredumb 6y ago
    I'm not even sure if it was intended, but I chuckled reading the word `circumlocution`.
- tyre 6y ago
  On the other hand, maybe some people are interested in a type of reading/writing but that doesn't mean they could do it themselves. Like last night I watched the writer Jia Tolentino interview Chanel Miller (the woman who was raped by Brock Turner, if you're familiar with the case.) Watching Jia think in real time is magical to me. Her writing, too, is at times incisive, at others deeply personal, sometimes indignant or marveling or both, and can still pull back to culture/society level relevance. I would say that the best of Jia's longform writing is among the best narrative non-fiction being written today. Is there a part of me that wants to be able to do that? i.e. am I a wannabe? I mean, kind of, but I also really enjoy it and that's more the point. I enjoy Ren Hang's photography but am not trying to be a photographer. I enjoy helping founders but don't have much desire to found another company. We don't _have_ to assume that everyone who enjoys something only says that they do because they are status-obsessed and lazy. EDIT: Another example I would give is Daniel Day Lewis. Good god the length he goes to to method act; the almost terrifying commitment. And it fucking pays off. But do I want that life? Hell no. Because I'm lazy? Maybe if I wanted that life then work ethic would be a question, but what disqualifies my trying to be Daniel Day Lewis in the first place is that I don't want to make the trade-offs he does — even if I could.

gerikson 6y ago

> Pope Clement VII was so influential that King Henry VIII had to leave the church and invent in Anglicanism just to escape. This is so amazingly reductive I can't take anything else in the post seriously.

defen 6y ago
"Explain the English Reformation in one sentence" is a pretty tall order, but it seems reasonable to wonder whether Clement VII would have allowed the annulment if Catherine of Aragon's nephew hadn't just sacked Rome and taken Clement prisoner.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The geography and logistics were wrong for either a successful covert assassination misson or installing/supporting an anti-pope to oust for one. The reason Anglicism lasted was because it was a large island such that it was hard to both have a navy capable of overcoming it, raising an army large enough to defeat it, and transport said large army after the naval fight. Anglicism was a branch born of cynical political power struggles and everyone knows it.
notahacker 6y ago
Oddly, I feel compelled to defend that bit of glibness. Sure, the Pope vetoed the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage because he was under extreme pressure to do so and Henry VIII left the Catholic Church out of frustration with this rather than anything resembling sympathy for what became the English Reformation, but the point was the Church's stance on being above worldly politics was borne out of being so integral to worldly politics they needed excuses. It'd be great for the rationalist movement if their leading figures were so influential on business, politics and actually existent AI they had to feign disinterest in them I guess the flip side of that argument also lives in British politics: the PM's advisor Dominic Cummings, who fulfils a Rasputin-like role of being on the one hand a magnet for criticism and on the other hand someone the PM will go to unprecedented extremes to continue to receive advice from[1]. He's also someone that has Overcoming Bias and Yudowsky in his short blogroll and sniggers at his detractors that "don't understand epistemological uncertainty" when his comments that his priorities "in some possible branches of the future... will be an error" get media attention. An archetypal 'rationalist' who is incidentally currently the UK's most influential policy wonk. [1]Usually British PMs don't accept their Chancellor's resignation so their adviser can fire his staff, or refrain from firing advisers whose actions become the #1 subject of public outcry from their core voter base.

kneel 6y ago

Rationalists tend to be irrational people who need help. No doubt there are some good thinkers in the sphere, but I don't know why you'd correlate rationalists with 'success'

elevenoh 6y ago
>Rationalists tend to be irrational people who need help. wot..
- Veen 6y ago
  I suppose an analogy is that the most puritanically religious are often those who feel most inclined to sin. Your average sinner doesn't feel the need to go full-on zealot to keep to the straight and narrow.
  - emiliobumachar 6y ago
    Scott Alexander: "A Christian proverb says: “The Church is not a country club for saints, but a hospital for sinners”. Likewise, the rationalist community is not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions, it’s a dojo for people learning to resist them." https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi...

afiodorov 6y ago

I have been heavily influenced by lesswrong. After the initial stage of encorporating the rationality identity and arguing about everything with everyone, I tried becoming more of an applied rationalist when I realised the first approch isn't leading me to winning anything. Shortly after I read: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-happy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-... I made a series of life changes. I can't attribute the blog post alone to these changes, but it was something that pushed me towards a more meaningful life. I stopped spending money on things and started buying experiences more often. I bought a bycicle (a thing but gives you many experiences) and started cycling to/from work in an effort to a) exercise b) spend more time outside. I broke up with my girlfriend of 9 years because I figured it just wasn't making me any happier. Cycling in London, UK for years made me very satisfied but I also got tired of the climate and I ended up finding a remote role and relocating to a climate where I can be outside every day. Finally I have started strength training - and now I am in a much better shape after doing it on a regular basis for a few years. It's hard to say that I am happier exactly, but there is a sense of liberty I feel that is hard to describe. The life I am living feels like my own, I feel the sense of control and I am liberated. I would like to think many of these things count as "winning".

TameAntelope 6y ago
I've treated lesswrong as a way to still make terrible choices, just by expressing bias in more complex thinking, which hides it better and makes us feel batter when we still experience the same outcomes.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  how would you judge the choices you have made? what would be a better choice, and how would you know it was better?
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    Poorly, because hindsight is hard, I just would skip the steps related to hiding my biases behind overly precise numbers.

lanstin 6y ago

I'm basing this more on friendships with libertarians than the article (tho I did read it, if not get the meaning); people are not rationality engines; reason is at the behest of emotions; reason is even often used to back-fill explanations for decisions made by the weighing of various neural networks for reasons concrete but obscure. Success for humans certainly is increased by an ability to reason well (quickly or slowly, depending on the field), but even more so on being able to motivate or persuade other humans; even technically, my success at learning complicated stuff is less being able to code and fix systems, but more at being able to consistently and correctly explain the complicated stuff and the logical consequences of the complicated stuff in meetings. I force myself to keep programming because I need to keep that understanding alive, but companies would be happy to have me just explaining stuff. And the people I've enjoyed working for the most are able to create a warm feeling of we are all in it together making cool new technologies! Yay we are making the internet! Pump up the feelings so we are motivated to use reason to solve problems in the path.

tunesmith 6y ago
I've seen the claim that reason is just emotional rationalization before. It strikes me as dreadfully cynical. Rationalizing one's emotions is the entire point of life. We experience something, it confuses us, we try to figure it out and explain it, model it so that we can better predict in the future. In other words, it's called "understanding". Understanding is a good thing, not a bad thing. I think the criticism is better and more narrowly targeted toward those that don't prioritize consistency. Yes, from your experiences and emotions, try to derive (or infer, rather) your principles. That's fine! But then, don't stop there. From there, try to remain consistent with those principles. And if they conflict, use that emotional experience to again understand and update your principles and then try to remain consistent with those.
- lanstin 6y ago
  Reason is not only or solely emotional rationalization, my point was that in the substrate of the brain, emotions are the motivator for our actions and long term patterns. You can't understand your self in completeness, at least so far. We are all just too complicated. There may be pieces you understand about your typical reactions and preferences, but like why do I like organ music and my wife hates it? Why do I love spicy curries and others don't? Very complex answers if any exist to these questions, much less why do I prefer a group decision making with a bit of arguing and a bit of time to mull over the answers? I don't derive or infer principles, I try to live up to principles, to squeeze something important into a few words so I can more often do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing. I certainly have emotions that are never going to be made into principles - I have even gotten so angry that I wished ill towards others, tho I cannot recommend the desire to harm others as beneficial for own happiness, the others well being, or society as a whole. For me the point of life is closer to building satisfying emotional experiences and connections, to people and to an great on-going work; to do good and heal harm; to enjoy each day's beauty. Those things are what make my reason work well. When I'm scheming in anger, my brain is less proficient at reason. When I'm walking under the pulsing Mars and mulling over some terraform issue, I'm a veritable fountain of rationality, which none the less cannot explain the happiness I feel when I return to the family after the walk. If you think you can come up with a reason to do one thing rather than another that is not based on something isomorphic to emotional drives, I wish good luck to you but I cannot have much hope in the likelihood of success.

gog-ma-gog 6y ago

Rationalists seem extremely common amongst the $300k+/year software engineers I know. If that isn’t “successful”, then I’m not sure we’re using the same word anymore. You can argue that the causal arrow doesn’t point in the right direction—that is, that people that are successful just happen to wear the affectation of “rationalist” because that happens to be fashionable, and not that their rationalism led them to a “successful” career, but that doesn’t seem to hold up against scrutiny, in my experience. Of those that I personally know, most have been engaged with the community since at least the golden days of lesswrong.

darawk 6y ago
I think this is exactly right. Being successful in the top 0.1% is not actually rational. Even if you're brilliant, your chance of succeeding at that level is low. A truly rational person seeks out the best risk-adjusted return, not the best absolute return. If you're a technical minded person, making 300k/year in a software job is about the best risk-adjusted return of any profession I can think of.
- andi999 6y ago
  Well the risk is you have to move to the US to get that kind of salary in a software job.
  - klipt 6y ago
    And the cost of living is so high that despite the fantastic salary most software engineers in Silicon Valley will never buy a house there. Great place to make money before retiring elsewhere though.
  - edanm 6y ago
    Well yes, but many other countries have similar math when it comes to software engineering salaries as opposed to other fields. In most places, going into software is a good thing to do moneywise.
    - 6y ago

elevenoh 6y ago

Are rationalists less likely to enter the pool of candidates endeavouring for wide-publicly-visible 'success' due to them noting the low probability of success reality - (and the discomforting fact that this arguably arises out of factors beyond one's control/foresight)? Entering this pool arguably requires a touch of useful delusion (e.g. trump).

js8 6y ago

I don't think just rationality cuts it, you need a goal. For example, I see many MBAs being rational in their relentless focus on efficiency. Yet, this is reactive (to the market), it doesn't follow any value in itself. To attempt to do something that nobody did before, or even to pursue a certain value above other, is inherently irrational. Yanis Varoufakis told a nice story about him teaching game theory. At the beginning of the semester, he offered the class a free pass of the course: Each student would write down the grade they would want and they would all be awarded by the minimal grade that was proposed. But first, they would have to agree on this proposal. He mentions that there always was a person who refused to agree. When he asked them, why did they were against it, they responded, without a hint of irony, there would surely be some idiot that would write down a low grade (and they would not pass). Frankly, I don't think this problem has a rational solution. It's a paradox - by being totally rational, you're being irrational. And I think the same is true for rationalism as a life philosophy. If you apply it to everything, the life will be hollow.

sudosysgen 6y ago
This is a very good point. Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system, and all value systems are inherently irrational. It manifests in philopshy as the "is-ought" problem.
- dbtc 6y ago
  Actually I think the value system of rationality is based on the (arguably irrational) belief in the supremacy of rationality. This is an ahumanist or post-humanist value system. Rationalism becomes a movement of transcendence from mortality, fleshly desires, the unconscious, and nature. The rationalist worships the neural network.
- chrchang523 6y ago
  Rationality is about internal consistency of beliefs and values. "Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system" strikes me as a category error. Giving you a value system isn't its job; instead, it provides a toolbox for identifying and resolving contradictions in your preexisting beliefs and values. (Since we all work with imperfect information about the world, internal consistency is far from a guarantee of accuracy; but it improves the odds.)

HONEST_ANNIE 6y ago

Why I Am Not A Technocrat by E. Glen Weyl https://blog.radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/2019-08-19-bv61r6/ https://blog.radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/2019-08-19-bv61r6...

darawk 6y ago
This is a great post, and i'm a huge fan of Glen Weyl, but Glen Weyl is the biggest purveyor of illegible-to-nontechnical-people technocratic ideas i've ever seen. I think his ideas are great and interesting, but I don't really understand on what level he views himself as separate and distinct from the rest of technocracy.

duxup 6y ago

I'm not generally into whatever scene this article is all about, but this seems like a sort of a down the philosophical rabbit hole that maybe has too little data or not a lot to do with 'success'? Maybe there's not enough rationalists to decide or maybe we don't know how many folks are rationalists or not so we can't answer the question? Or success has nothing to do with being a rationalist or not? Or 'success' isn't easily defined / observed? This seems like measuring something that I'm not sure you can measure, or tell if it matters or not.

screye 6y ago

My hypothesis: Rationalists are the opposite of visionaries. A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your hobbies is success. It is also more reliably achievable. A rationalist thrives in the absence of uncertainty. Becoming a decent engineer is a far more reliable way to be successful than starting the next billion dollar company. That is practically leaving everything up to luck. The truth is, we only see two kinds of successful people in media. The lucky, the pig-headed visionary and those who fall in line. Rationalists are by ideology averse to luck, stubbornness and compliance. Go figure, why they do not feature in cohorts so opposed to their core ideology. Now militant rationalists are rarely rationalists. If anything, acknowledging the virtue of gut feeling/intuition in presence of uncertainty and the the prevalence of uncertainty in everything we do, are the 2 most evident facts of our universe. To make a strong claim of correctness in the presence of massive uncertainty, is innately irrational. That being said, a lot of the most successful people I've met, use various tools of rationalism quite frequently.

CydeWeys 6y ago
That's me to a T. I was a "militant rationalist" as it were, back in high school. Anyone remember talk.origins?
- spiritplumber 6y ago
  it's no longer around? talkorigins.org seems to work
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    I was referring more to the newsgroup than the archives site, but I used past tense because I haven't been a regular there in almost two decades now. [1] https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  Yes, I spent a lot of time there and on the JREF forums.

praptak 6y ago

"How to Solve It" by Polya is a great book about general techniques for solving hard math problems. It also contains a warning: "[...]if we're not careful, the next generation of students will be able to talk the hind leg off a donkey about the thought-processes involving in solving problems but will be able to operate only at a very low level in terms of content." My (admittedly untestable or at least hard to test) hypothesis is that people who identify themselves as rationalists fell into this trap.

goostavos 6y ago
It's an easy trap to fall into. Reading and thinking about how you'll think when you need to solve that hard problem is waaaay easier than actually solving the hard problem. Plus, you get this little bonus of still feeling like your doing something productive -- "I'm just sharpening the axe really quick." Meanwhile, no actual work is done.

nafey 6y ago

Counterpoint: a lot of successful people who do not claim the mantle of rationalism are infact rationalists.

ggm 6y ago

Secular Humanists > Rationalists. The Rationalists can get into difficult corners. Rationally, the way to fix many problems is de-humanising.

fullshark 6y ago
I'd rather be a rationalizationist, they've never been wrong once.
- ggm 6y ago
  Certainly, convincing rationalists their rationality is based on skewed evidence and false reasoning is hard. I try to ration my time investment on this, rationalising that I will gain more by doing less. Which is in it's own way, the Zen outcome: rationally, we're all dead for a long time so, why bother? Postscript: rationalisationism is post-hoc reasoning. I did take the last cookie, now, think of a justification why it's OK.. working in children's brains since the invention of the cookie jar.
- screye 6y ago
  Genius ! Got a good chuckle out of me.

dbtc 6y ago

If something ends in 'ist' or 'ism' it probably isn't rational. But then, perfect rationality is only possible if you can keep the irrational aspects of the universe out of your personal reality...

thotsBgone 6y ago
Scientist. Humanitarianism. Orthodontist. Egalitarianism. Industrialist. Magnetism. Psychologist. Stoicism. Virologist. Capitalism. Neurologist. Formalism. I could list dozens more.
- dbtc 6y ago
  list ;)

jerf 6y ago

The problem is the competition is much better than anticipated. Human irrationality is greatly overstated, because people conflate being bad at explaining why they are doing something with doing something irrational. Humans aren't anywhere near as irrational as portrayed. If they were, they'd be dead. Not just, like, dying today, but dead long ago, and you'd have never been born, because humans would just be dead. Reality does not permit high degrees of irrationality to survive very long. To listen to some people describe it, humans are beings who, when presented with a choice between a cookie now or two cookies in 15 minutes, choose to gouge their eyes out. Rationality studies aren't going to rewire a fundamentally crazy, irrational person into a rational one that is suddenly the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Rationality studies can only clean up some of the rough edges on a being that fundamentally behaves fairly rationally most of the time. There isn't anywhere near as much room for optimization as some people seem to think. And part of the reason for this is, it is very difficult to overstate how bad humans are at explaining why they are doing something. Just, mind-blowingly bad. Study after study reinforces the endless parade of anecdotes from my own life. Everything agrees; people are terrible at this. But, the thing is... doing the rational thing for the wrong reason, or without any reason at all, is still doing the rational thing. Jodie may gossip terribly about Ethel for all sorts of reasons our calm, collected putative "rationalists" declare to be "irrational", and Jodie herself may think she's doing it because Ethel is ugly and smells bad and just pissed her off yesterday, but nevertheless, the goal Jodie doesn't even consciously know she has is likely to be attained, and Jodie's access to better mates is likely to be successfully increased at Ethel's expense. (Not "guaranteed", but likely enough that, well, this strategy has been around since the dawn of recorded history and is still going strong for a reason, you know?) A good chunk of the remaining belief about human irrationality will come from people who aren't clearly looking at the world, and will declare on one level or another that that's an irrational thing for Jodie to want... but... goals are much less amenable to "rationality" than means. That you personally think Jodie shouldn't want that, or shouldn't need to want that, or whatever, doesn't change the fact that Jodie is operating on that goal, and really quite rationally pursuing it. That said, there is room for improvement. But I don't think it's the sort of improvement that leads to fame and visibility very often; it's life improvement. Nobody's famous for really having their life together, and making good decisions. But there are still plenty of people who are better at it and plenty who are worse, and even if there isn't as much room as some people may think to improve that, there's still plenty to make it worthwhile.

deleted 6y ago

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mistidoi 6y ago

Funny typo: 'The LSD has an estimated $5B in annual revenue". :)

dllthomas 6y ago
I assumed it was a Star Trek reference.

CydeWeys 6y ago

I can by no means claim to be as knowledgeable on any of this stuff as the post's author is, but my take on this has always been that rationalism is a philosophical view, and thus, it's really not clear why you'd think it should lead to great material success given that philosophers in the modern world tend not to achieve said great success. I am personally enthralled by philosophy and I'd also consider myself a rationalist (and have spent a decent amount of time reading SSC), but I'm unable to draw any sort of putative causal connection between that and being very successful. Indeed, delving into this stuff is what I do to screw around, so pretty much exactly the opposite.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

I was very involved with the Less Wrong community starting when it was the joint Overcoming Bias blog between Yudkowski and Hanson through the splinter off and into the formation of MIRI (fmr: Singularity institute) around 2008-2011 or so. I think it comes down to a few factors. 1. Deep Learning took off and took the narrative as the "right path" to "General AI." Back in its heyday all the LW folks (including myself) were really focused on approaching AI from the perspective of Pearl's Causality and the work of Ray Solomonoff 2. There were no practical products, tools, frameworks or research that came out of that group that could either be easily applied to existing business or demonstrated SOTA on any computing domain. 3. AGI/GAI/HLAI/etc... is generally still (unfairly IMO) seen as the domain for cranks and zealots - which was the primary end-goal of the LW crowd, where "rationality" was the practical middle-step. 4. It kind of turned into a mini-cult around Yudkowski, which IMO turned people off [0] https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/

Verdex 6y ago
> It kind of turned into a mini-cult around Yudkowski I think this transformation had already happened when I first heard of rationalists. Some of the things that they were saying seemed vaguely interesting. But I couldn't quite put my finger on something being off. At some point I came to the conclusion that Yudkowski was some sort of cult leader like figure. A cult around rational thinking. Isn't that something. Then later tiger king came out and I realized that apparently everything can devolve into forming cults.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Humans can turn (almost) anything/anyone into a tribal fetish.
mordymoop 6y ago
The rationalist community and the number of people who call themselves rationalists has actually grown enormously (exponentially, in fact) since those early days. Modern rationalists exist in all walks of life. The early Yudkowsky-centered rationalist movement is a historical, not a modern depiction.

Nasrudith 6y ago

Because rationalism is more about not taking avoidable losses by frankly being stupid than producing outliers by doing something normally stupid or crazy that pays off and get noticed. Nobody pays attention to the 999 times someone prays for rain and fails but the 1 time it does and it called "working a miracle". That sort of selection bias is in play here but worse as they ignore the background yields of regularly applied rationalism. Not to mention the projection involved - "success" is easy to come by if you have a crowd of rubes paying for what they want to believe but rationalism doesn't offer anything with such popular appeal directly. Really the whole article is anti-intellectualism fallacies strung together in a "If where the rays of the sun don't create gold why aren't you rich!" style fallacious retort.

Matticus_Rex 6y ago

I run into successful rationalists all the time in the business world. They might not self-label (I don't, though I acknowledge that the sequences have drastically changed my life), but we're definitely in the demo he's talking about. Yes, there may be some selection bias, but I know for a fact that the way I'm able to contribute at work has quite a bit to do with things I've learned from the rationalist community. It definitely improves things to work some of the relevant lingo into your work environment so you can more easily help colleagues grok why the perspective you have on a topic seems very different, and I can see an argument that in many areas you'd be better off with specific knowledge. But is that the trade-off? Not in my experience. You can have both, or at least 80% of both.

motohagiography 6y ago

Funding your companies, advising your executives and politicians, building your products, and smack talking on HN. It is a funny question though. I might posit that it's not a philosophy so much as a subculture that appreciates a certain flavour of writing. There's a form, like a prog-rock anthem or a minimalist piece, where writers ourselves tend to appreciate it, but where most people are just looking for something to dance to. If I could characterize most of the criticism I've read of rationalist writing, it would be that their main complaint is they can't dance to it.

yaacov 6y ago

How about Dominic Cummings? I don’t like the guy, but he clearly thinks of himself as a rationalist and has been extremely successful.

Tomminn 6y ago

Rationalism is hydrofluoric acid. It silently creeps inside you and hollows out essential parts of you when you thought it was just a tool helpful for dissolving some external problem. You start with a problem, and instead of solving the problem, you end up just losing your desire for the solution. It's our nature to be self obsessed. So when we learn a new way of thinking, we cannot help but make ourselves the primary target of it. And nothing will disabuse you of a deeply held, arational, intensely motivational heroic narrative like the tools of rationalism.

ggggtez 6y ago

I have no idea what this guy is talking about to be honest. I can't really discern even what claim they are trying to disprove in this 10 year old blog post by another author referencing another discussion that I don't have background on.

anm89 6y ago

Where are the successful philosophers in general? His opening complaint is that the most successful rationalist philosophers are stuck in academic philosophy and then goes on to name the only modern philosophers I've ever heard of. Academic philosophy has long been a circle jerk that occasionally in a moment of triumphant success becomes useful as a side note to something in AI research or whatever. I mean, when was the last time that an academic philosophy paper made it to the front page of HN?( which is probably the most receptive mainstream audience that is ever going to exist for something like that)

gweinberg 6y ago

I think most super-successful people have taken gambles that were apriori foolish but ended up paying off. People who behave more or less rationally may not get the big jackpots, but they get a lot of small wins and avoid most catastrophes.

biolurker1 6y ago

The post talks like rationalism is a choice someone makes. It's not though.

sergefaguet 6y ago

I personally know at least one rationalist who is amongst the wealthiest people in the world and got there at least in part as a direct consequence of his rationalist interests, uses the lingo etc. (No, I won’t say who it is) That being said most people who self-identify as rationalists are significantly held back by (a) lack of charisma (b) the fact that they believe that their elaborate mental constructs are reality. Of course these are just another mental narrative, and not even a particularly useful one.

dkarl 6y ago

Of course analyzing arguments logically is a valuable skill, but here's the thing: the educational preparation for fields where rational thinking is most valuable is already chock full of opportunities to practice and refine rational thinking. After years of practice, what further marginal gains can be made by further analysis and study of the skill itself? Isn't it overwhelmingly likely that a person with that background has other, more pressing weaknesses they can work on to promote their success? Unfortunately, the people who gravitate towards rationalism tend to be people who are already good at it and naturally oriented towards it, people who are more likely to lack the skill of turning it off. When somebody makes an argument to you, you want to think along with them, try to inhabit their head temporarily. You'll learn things about them that allow you to work productively with them and even understand the factual content of their speech better. If you're diagnosing the logical structure of their irrationality while they speak, it's going to knock you out of their headspace, like spotting plot holes in a movie takes you out of the film. You've spotted something invalidating, and now you have to wrestle your brain back into paying attention. I would wager that the best movie critics aren't generally elite at spotting continuity errors. Learning to turn critical distance on and off, and to direct it where you need it to go (focusing on emotional dynamics, for instance, instead of logical structure,) is probably the skill that many people attracted to rationalism really need, but by doubling down on rationalism they're making it even more automatic. That aside, I think the fundamental question of the article is bizarre. Where are the successful "sprinters" in professional football? Speed is a critical factor for wide receivers and defensive backs, and they train for it, but they don't go around calling themselves sprinters or talking about sprint training in their press conferences. Speed is a skill and a quality for them, not an identity. Self-identifying as a "sprinter" would be counterproductive for a defensive back, because it takes one element of success and elevates it above the others instead of balancing it against them. It only makes sense if being a sprinter is more important to them than being successful as a defensive back, and you wouldn't imagine a person with that order of priorities to achieve elite success as a defensive back. As a skill and a quality, rather than an identity, rationalism might be common at the top of every field; who knows. That's a more interesting question at least.

tim333 6y ago

Some of the richest people in the world - I'm thinking Bezos, Gates and Buffett - are pretty rational even if they don't blog much.

oli5679 6y ago

Jeff Bezos seems to have a pretty rationalist philosophy, although he doesn't cite Yudkowsky. Gates and Musk seem to have aspects of it too. "I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried."[1] https://medium.com/@alyjuma/the-regret-minimization-framework-how-jeff-bezos-made-decisions-4d5a86deaf24 https://medium.com/@alyjuma/the-regret-minimization-framewor...