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Any toolbox can be misused. Anything can be made into an idol. The fact remains that the "lesswrong rationalism" community was the first to popularize several

Any toolbox can be misused. Anything can be made into an idol. The fact remains that the "lesswrong rationalism" community was the first to popularize several rather sophisticated reasoning concepts. They have provided common reference points that have made it easier for me to communicate my thinking to others and vice versa, and I am far from the only writer/reader who has benefited in this way. As a consequence, I'm generally sympathetic to this group, and personally identify as a rationalist. I agree that the heuristic "internal consistency is always worth actively working on" can go very wrong. It looks like you're defining rationalism as structuring of one's life around that heuristic; I'm guessing you must have had bad experiences with people who actually do that.

sudosysgen 6y ago
In that case, you're not advocating for rationalism. It's a word that has a well accepted definition of a philosophical framework where reason is the primary source of justification and (moral) truth. Just using reason to come to conclusions that aren't necessarily ultimately justified or deriving truth from pure reason is literally the entire concept of Western philosophy. And by Western, I mean from Iceland to Bagdad and beyond. I'm fairly certain it's also the entire concept of Eastern philosophy too but I don't know much about that. Lesswrong is certainly good for introducing concepts and allowing discussions. That does not a philosophy make. I'm not critiquing the website, nor the community, but the "pure reason" rationalist philosophy that a lot of people there adopted and peddled, without spending enough time justifying it, instead spending vast amounts of time applying. This is exactly what the article was addressing when it talks about rationalism, too. Rationalism is, by definition, idolatry of reason. At the very minimum, to even show any kind of rationalism, you have to believe that somethings are true by virtue of pure reason, independently of the empirical world. Rationalism really doesn't have any thing to do with using or not using reason.

sudosysgen 6y ago

In that case, you're not advocating for rationalism. It's a word that has a well accepted definition of a philosophical framework where reason is the primary source of justification and (moral) truth. Just using reason to come to conclusions that aren't necessarily ultimately justified or deriving truth from pure reason is literally the entire concept of Western philosophy. And by Western, I mean from Iceland to Bagdad and beyond. I'm fairly certain it's also the entire concept of Eastern philosophy too but I don't know much about that. Lesswrong is certainly good for introducing concepts and allowing discussions. That does not a philosophy make. I'm not critiquing the website, nor the community, but the "pure reason" rationalist philosophy that a lot of people there adopted and peddled, without spending enough time justifying it, instead spending vast amounts of time applying. This is exactly what the article was addressing when it talks about rationalism, too. Rationalism is, by definition, idolatry of reason. At the very minimum, to even show any kind of rationalism, you have to believe that somethings are true by virtue of pure reason, independently of the empirical world. Rationalism really doesn't have any thing to do with using or not using reason.