6 ms·

The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this

The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him, work through his reasoning, and update his blog with a note about it, but that didn't satisfy the author: > Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes > One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often. This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone. Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.

HideousKojima 4y ago
>debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.
323 4y ago
You know those jokes about "how do you know someone is a vegan/PhD"? Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".
toolz 4y ago
- dekhn 4y ago
  I didn't read this and suddenly think "oh my god- the whole establishment is wrong! How thankful I am that some rational person has done the hard math for me to explain why ivermectin is a magic cure". The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself. As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
  - toolz 4y ago
    As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. Unless some new body of Ivermectin research has come out that I'm unaware of, then you're misrepresenting current medical opinion by a long shot.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. I don't know if he is the first person to suggest it, but you are incorrect that there is no published research supporting it. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173#:~:text=Importance%20A%20widely%20cited%20meta,appropriate%20interpretation%20of%20this%20analysis https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle....
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Doctors were discussing the idea in Grand Rounds at UCSF a couple years ago. I can't find the recording right now.
topgun77 4y ago
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    - topgun77 4y ago
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      - topgun77 4y ago
        DonHopkins 4y ago
        topgun77 4y ago
  - topgun77 4y ago
    - Retric 4y ago
      That post wasn’t arguing a position or trying to convince people of something.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism. ...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.
the_only_law 4y ago
> The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.
astrange 4y ago
There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. We’re all sinners.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias
- astrange 4y ago
  > Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other. Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others). once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid. Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.

HideousKojima 4y ago

>debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.

323 4y ago

You know those jokes about "how do you know someone is a vegan/PhD"? Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".

toolz 4y ago

dekhn 4y ago
I didn't read this and suddenly think "oh my god- the whole establishment is wrong! How thankful I am that some rational person has done the hard math for me to explain why ivermectin is a magic cure". The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself. As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
- toolz 4y ago
  As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. Unless some new body of Ivermectin research has come out that I'm unaware of, then you're misrepresenting current medical opinion by a long shot.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. I don't know if he is the first person to suggest it, but you are incorrect that there is no published research supporting it. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790173#:~:text=Importance%20A%20widely%20cited%20meta,appropriate%20interpretation%20of%20this%20analysis https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle....
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Doctors were discussing the idea in Grand Rounds at UCSF a couple years ago. I can't find the recording right now.

topgun77 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y ago
  - topgun77 4y ago
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    - topgun77 4y ago
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        topgun77 4y ago
- topgun77 4y ago
  - Retric 4y ago
    That post wasn’t arguing a position or trying to convince people of something.

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism. ...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.

the_only_law 4y ago

> The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.

astrange 4y ago

There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...

the_only_law 4y ago
> I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin. We’re all sinners.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias

astrange 4y ago
> Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other. Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
dekhn 4y ago
I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others). once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid. Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.