10 ms·

My falling-out with the rationalist community

90 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

vovavili 3mo ago
This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.
- cogman10 3mo ago
  I think the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths which can lead to truly unhinged and irrational beliefs and actions (see: the Zizians). That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evidence for why those priors should be accepted.
  - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
    Consider a community filled with 100 people; 95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do. Those 5 will inevitably become the public face of the community when they make the news. However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them.
    - astrange 3mo ago
      The entire point of rationalism is to take your own beliefs seriously and follow them as if you were a robot. (Except that they don't claim them to be "their own beliefs" but instead call them "priors".)
    - cogman10 3mo ago
      > However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them. How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member of the 5% (and if those percentages are accurate). You can observe the same dynamic in any church. Everyone in the congregation will have different levels of belief, but when it comes to sharing a testimony you'll be hard pressed to distinguish between who the true believers are and who's just "faking it until you make it".
      - zahlman 3mo ago
        > gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
        cogman10 3mo ago
        > What gatherings? Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1] > What beliefs? It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk. > What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity? I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs and are instead simply having fun with it. Only a small 5% are actually sincere. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/lessonline_rationalist_festival_may_31st_june_2nd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/les...
        zahlman 3mo ago
        Okay, but those pieces don't establish your claim. You would need a Roko's basilisk-like concept that only 5% of the community agree with, and a "group meetup" or "conference" where "they all" (i.e.: also the 95%) "proclaim that their beliefs (i.e.: including the basilisk thing) are true". If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the available evidence and the other 95% think the evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
    - joegibbs 3mo ago
      Doesn't it say something if 5% of a group are wacko lunatics if, for instance, a random sample of the rest of the population has only 0.5% wackos?
      - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
        I would never disagree that the rationality community contains a higher than normal share of lunatics. Whether it produces or attracts them is an open question.
  - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
    >the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data. If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.
- twic 3mo ago
  It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less. [1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le... [2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rationalist-cults https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...
  - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
    Raising existential risk from AI in the same sentence as "rationality demands we murder our landlord" is a bit weird a grouping.
  - krapp 3mo ago
    Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w
    - lux-lux-lux 3mo ago
      I’ve interacted with a number of rationalists that are just as crazy as Ziz but managed to not implode with the help of money (either lucking into it via family/crypto or a tech job). My personal hot take is that if she’d been cis a number of people would still be alive.
    - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
      taking what ideology to the conclusions? The zizians throught some truly bizzare things, most of which are in no way representative of the rationilst community.
    - 3mo ago
- g-b-r 3mo ago
  It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them. If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously dangerous cult.
  - zahlman 3mo ago
    > It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way. > That, along with constantly calling yourself rational This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.
    - justonepost2 3mo ago
      https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m
      - g-b-r 3mo ago
        Oh, they're working to instate a dictatorship, they're not that bad...
        justonepost2 3mo ago
        For the record, I’m not saying this particular loser on twitter will ever have the power to institute a dictatorship. But it is insane to say that EA and rationalism* are not about believing you are superior and more rational than your peers, or that most EA/rats don’t make an identity out of it (look at any of their online presences). Anthropic literally exists to funnel money and influence to its EA/rat cofounders and early investors, who sincerely believe that they and they alone are smart and rational enough to shepherd our society through its “technological adolescence”. I wish people who agree with this would at least be honest about it.
- mbgerring 3mo ago
  The people who sincerely believe that humans should be turned into mulch for the Computer God are “well meaning”? Say more
- nialv7 3mo ago
  > online nerds you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example
comrade1234 3mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 3mo ago
  Please don't post snark on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
twic 3mo ago
> Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims. Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.
- stickfigure 3mo ago
  OP's take seems to be unfairly critical. I wasn't at the MIT or Georgia Tech lectures (Gene Ray spoke once at each) but it sounds like the audience was pretty respectful, all things considered. He was given uninterrupted time to explain his ideas, then question and answer. No shouting. Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant. A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way." Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago
    I'm not even sure it was the rationalists, just ordinary MIT/Georgia Tech students. But my understanding (I wasn't there obviously) is like you say that Gene Ray was not invited to speak so he could be easily humiliated by people larping the superior intellects, but instead treated with curiosity and respect even if it was clear like you say that his ideas were a little bit mad. Tbh I think people were just fascinated to find someone with such outlandish ideas who was so entirely caught up with their own creation. So I think the author is maybe overreacting in that one. The rest, what he says about "rationalists" going after flat earthers and intelligent designers etc with a list of logical fallacies at hand, for sport, that's very true.
- zahlman 3mo ago
  The original timecube.com died (domain registration expiration) in 2015 (shortly after its creator) and timecube.net is a reboot from 2023 (and I can find nothing tying it to the estate or anything like that).
ggm 3mo ago
This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing. Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)
- deleted 3mo ago
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- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials. And Dawkins never had much of a research career. My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down. There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those. So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.
  - pdonis 3mo ago
    > Dawkins never had much of a research career. Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative. Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this: Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.” If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.
novia 3mo ago
This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists
- actsasbuffoon 3mo ago
  Yeah, that felt abrupt. Leave the audience wanting more, I guess?
- kenforthewin 3mo ago
  It's a shame because I think there a lot of valid, thoughtful critiques one could level at the Rat/EA community; but this was not that.
- danielhaven 3mo ago
  They got to him before he could finish.
- stevage 3mo ago
  I often have this experience with blog posts on HN. They do all the background, and once they get to the juicy bit, it ends.
- gwd 3mo ago
  They did. The entire section starting with "Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else" talks about the failure of the rationalist community to be any better than any other group. Then this describes the actual break: > By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists. I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft. In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more." The implication being that after this they no longer considered themselves a rationalist, nor engaged in its form of arguing. ETA: FWIW, I mean... hard things are hard? It's the normal state of the world that people think they've done the hard thing but are actually just finding excuses to do what they want. People like J.D. Vance decide to be a Catholic, but turns out Jesus' actual teachings are so counter-intuitive that he still doesn't understand them and does them badly. Actually being rational is a difficult, mostly solo activity. Quitting rationalism (or Christianity, or ...) because most of the people around you are just cosplaying is like quitting chess because most of the people around you are just playing around and never get past 1200 ELO. Or like quitting weightlifting because most people around you talk about reps and whatever but never actually push themselves enough to get past their current plateau. Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?
nradov 3mo ago
Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.
- api 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lyu07282 3mo ago
    Though much more destructive to society than Scientology, it's the cult that is underpinning Technofeudalism, these are people (almost) as vile as Ayn Rand.
    - api 3mo ago
      I'd say rationalism and technofeudalism/neoreaction are adjacent more than directly linked. They seemed to develop in parallel around the same time and involved regulars on some of the same boards.
- popalchemist 3mo ago
  Indeed, it is literally an ideology.
- smitty1e 3mo ago
  It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason. Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.
  - ip26 3mo ago
    It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.
    - 3mo ago
Planktonne 3mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago
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- cogman10 3mo ago
  Falling for a cult is something that can happen to almost anyone. I think it's somewhat healthy for one to recognize they were in a cult and to share the experience of realizing that and getting out. It may come off as smug, but it's also a pretty vulnerable thing to do as you are admitting "I was duped". The main smugness one can have is thinking they are immune to falling for a cult. Lot's of people do for lots of reasons. It's particularly likely when someone is in a vulnerable position in life (death, depression, major life change). Sometimes people are simply born into the cults and realize later that everything their family and community believes is a lie. Regardless, cults are pretty good at finding and "loving" people into the cult. All this is to say that everyone should take a moment to question their core beliefs. Why do I believe this? Could I be wrong? How would I know I'm wrong? Questions I know I wish I asked and explored earlier in life. The honest answers, though, can be devastating if this part of your identity or family identity.
  - Planktonne 3mo ago
    I fully agree with everything you've said, but crucially, I don't think this article, or the others like it, are actually recognising their own vulnerability. The framing isn't 'I fell for this and I was wrong', but 'I am the first one f all of you to see the truth'; there's no humility, no recognition, just the exact same self-delusion, which means they'll fall into the next pit head-first as well.
    - cogman10 3mo ago
      Fair enough. I just have a soft spot for people recognizing that they've been duped. It happened to me personally and I know it's a pretty difficult thing to go through. So I just tend to give a lot of grace even though the person might be an asshole as they deconstruct.
deleted 3mo ago
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throwawayffffas 3mo ago
> Of course, as a rational person, you wanted to side with the scientists; if nothing else, it seemed like the winning move. The rational person does not engage with the argument. Because there is nothing to be gained from the argument. The winning move is not to play.
jdw64 3mo ago
Every community has its biases, and everywhere there's a tendency for complex factors to combine and simplify into attractive patterns. In the end, even I can't escape bias. And when I realize how ignorant I am, I feel like I have no choice but to live face to face with how pathetic I am. Even if I'm aware of my bounded rationality and ignorance, there are still moments when I fail to recognize even that ignorance. I feel like I just have to live with the awareness of how contradictory a being I am
- pilgrim0 3mo ago
  The path of virtue requires we recognize and appreciate the grace that lies in being humbled by our own stupidity.
  - oliculipolicula 3mo ago
    And this is why the difficulty of convincing yourself of who downvoted you was a terrible idea of tptacek's ;) I'll admit I won't be entirely able to stick to the virtue of only wanting to find out which of downvoters were justified whenever the situation pops up Nowadays I'll only say that idea was bad BC it's hard (emotionally, at least) to reverse once implemented
greygoo222 3mo ago
This is a pretty low-quality article that didn't give me the impression the author spent any time in the "rationalist community." It's just a list of the few mainstream controversies.
- g-b-r 3mo ago
  If you say so. I'm sure you're impartial about the matter.
ultrablack 3mo ago
Damore was clearly right though.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
sxp 3mo ago
> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3UKmQTKiXjM92p3dtyybtlwt4q3r3lDw/viewanalytics https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U... > What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument. One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoupling-vs-high-decoupling https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...
- pavel_lishin 3mo ago
  That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.
  - alephnerd 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - lux-lux-lux 3mo ago
    Well-educated young middle class white men, and with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics. The only real outlier is the openness to HBD/scientific racism stuff.
    - pavel_lishin 3mo ago
      [flagged]
deleted 3mo ago
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anon-3988 3mo ago
> Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning. So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion. If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas. If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion. All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut. I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.
- nialv7 3mo ago
  > So they are not rationalist then? one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.
- pilgrim0 3mo ago
  It’s because of cowardice. Discussing emotions entails being exposed to some degree, but this strain of so called rationality seems rather to be about distancing oneself from the subject in question, which tends to make people feel and behave like arbiters. One could argue that the poets are the real rationalists, at least the good ones. Because there’s no distancing from the truth, just raw and pure content, which is radically different than second order, cheap, hopelessly biased analysis.
- henryaj 3mo ago
  > This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion This is not true of rationalists! "Straw Vulcan" as a failure mode was talked about fifteen years ago - https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan
bifrost 3mo ago
Oh man I love this: "Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality." So many "things" where its "we're the good guys club and if you're not in our club you're the bad guy".
- Tomte 3mo ago
  Like "Non-violent communication"
henryaj 3mo ago
Damore wasn't a rationalist but his memo was at least somewhat reasonable, and didn't merit him being cancelled. > From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn Do people do this in practice? 80K for example (EA not rat, but EA is the policy arm of rationalism after all) expressly warn against this. Feels like a strawman.
- H8crilA 3mo ago
  Yes, those that work in intelligence, sort of. The depth and character of application of this rule depends on a particular country. For example nearly all of them would justify a few murders to keep trade routes open.
jhanschoo 3mo ago
Admittedly I'm quite removed from the Bay Area rationalists, but I get the perception that unlike with many other ideological communities, you could always lay out your countervailing opinion with evidence. You could disagree on many things and still be in conversation with the community. Stuff including early stuff like the Sequences are subject to criticism and reevaluation. If my perception is correct, then imo a community that is (in parts) in critical conversation with itself seems more grounded to me than the usual strongly ideological and religious communities.
rsynnott 3mo ago
The fascinating thing to me about rationalism is that it has its routes in scepticism, and particularly atheistic scepticism, and yet it seems to have evolved into, essentially, the 21st century's first notable religion. (Though in a way that feels a little derivative; I suspect that many of the principals just took _Hyperion_ _way_ too seriously, tbh...)

90 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.

cogman10 3mo ago
I think the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths which can lead to truly unhinged and irrational beliefs and actions (see: the Zizians). That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evidence for why those priors should be accepted.
- FeepingCreature 3mo ago
  Consider a community filled with 100 people; 95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do. Those 5 will inevitably become the public face of the community when they make the news. However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them.
  - astrange 3mo ago
    The entire point of rationalism is to take your own beliefs seriously and follow them as if you were a robot. (Except that they don't claim them to be "their own beliefs" but instead call them "priors".)
  - cogman10 3mo ago
    > However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them. How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member of the 5% (and if those percentages are accurate). You can observe the same dynamic in any church. Everyone in the congregation will have different levels of belief, but when it comes to sharing a testimony you'll be hard pressed to distinguish between who the true believers are and who's just "faking it until you make it".
    - zahlman 3mo ago
      > gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
      - cogman10 3mo ago
        > What gatherings? Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1] > What beliefs? It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk. > What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity? I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs and are instead simply having fun with it. Only a small 5% are actually sincere. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/lessonline_rationalist_festival_may_31st_june_2nd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/les...
        zahlman 3mo ago
        Okay, but those pieces don't establish your claim. You would need a Roko's basilisk-like concept that only 5% of the community agree with, and a "group meetup" or "conference" where "they all" (i.e.: also the 95%) "proclaim that their beliefs (i.e.: including the basilisk thing) are true". If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the available evidence and the other 95% think the evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
  - joegibbs 3mo ago
    Doesn't it say something if 5% of a group are wacko lunatics if, for instance, a random sample of the rest of the population has only 0.5% wackos?
    - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
      I would never disagree that the rationality community contains a higher than normal share of lunatics. Whether it produces or attracts them is an open question.
- s1artibartfast 3mo ago
  >the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data. If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.
twic 3mo ago
It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less. [1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-leverage-research https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le... [2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rationalist-cults https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...
- FeepingCreature 3mo ago
  Raising existential risk from AI in the same sentence as "rationality demands we murder our landlord" is a bit weird a grouping.
- krapp 3mo ago
  Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w
  - lux-lux-lux 3mo ago
    I’ve interacted with a number of rationalists that are just as crazy as Ziz but managed to not implode with the help of money (either lucking into it via family/crypto or a tech job). My personal hot take is that if she’d been cis a number of people would still be alive.
  - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
    taking what ideology to the conclusions? The zizians throught some truly bizzare things, most of which are in no way representative of the rationilst community.
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g-b-r 3mo ago
It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them. If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously dangerous cult.
- zahlman 3mo ago
  > It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way. > That, along with constantly calling yourself rational This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.
  - justonepost2 3mo ago
    https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m
    - g-b-r 3mo ago
      Oh, they're working to instate a dictatorship, they're not that bad...
      - justonepost2 3mo ago
        For the record, I’m not saying this particular loser on twitter will ever have the power to institute a dictatorship. But it is insane to say that EA and rationalism* are not about believing you are superior and more rational than your peers, or that most EA/rats don’t make an identity out of it (look at any of their online presences). Anthropic literally exists to funnel money and influence to its EA/rat cofounders and early investors, who sincerely believe that they and they alone are smart and rational enough to shepherd our society through its “technological adolescence”. I wish people who agree with this would at least be honest about it.
mbgerring 3mo ago
The people who sincerely believe that humans should be turned into mulch for the Computer God are “well meaning”? Say more
nialv7 3mo ago
> online nerds you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example

comrade1234 3mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 3mo ago
Please don't post snark on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

twic 3mo ago

> Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims. Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.

stickfigure 3mo ago
OP's take seems to be unfairly critical. I wasn't at the MIT or Georgia Tech lectures (Gene Ray spoke once at each) but it sounds like the audience was pretty respectful, all things considered. He was given uninterrupted time to explain his ideas, then question and answer. No shouting. Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant. A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way." Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago
  I'm not even sure it was the rationalists, just ordinary MIT/Georgia Tech students. But my understanding (I wasn't there obviously) is like you say that Gene Ray was not invited to speak so he could be easily humiliated by people larping the superior intellects, but instead treated with curiosity and respect even if it was clear like you say that his ideas were a little bit mad. Tbh I think people were just fascinated to find someone with such outlandish ideas who was so entirely caught up with their own creation. So I think the author is maybe overreacting in that one. The rest, what he says about "rationalists" going after flat earthers and intelligent designers etc with a list of logical fallacies at hand, for sport, that's very true.
zahlman 3mo ago
The original timecube.com died (domain registration expiration) in 2015 (shortly after its creator) and timecube.net is a reboot from 2023 (and I can find nothing tying it to the estate or anything like that).

ggm 3mo ago

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing. Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)

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TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials. And Dawkins never had much of a research career. My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down. There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those. So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.
- pdonis 3mo ago
  > Dawkins never had much of a research career. Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative. Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this: Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.” If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.

novia 3mo ago

This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists

actsasbuffoon 3mo ago
Yeah, that felt abrupt. Leave the audience wanting more, I guess?
kenforthewin 3mo ago
It's a shame because I think there a lot of valid, thoughtful critiques one could level at the Rat/EA community; but this was not that.
danielhaven 3mo ago
They got to him before he could finish.
stevage 3mo ago
I often have this experience with blog posts on HN. They do all the background, and once they get to the juicy bit, it ends.
gwd 3mo ago
They did. The entire section starting with "Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else" talks about the failure of the rationalist community to be any better than any other group. Then this describes the actual break: > By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists. I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft. In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more." The implication being that after this they no longer considered themselves a rationalist, nor engaged in its form of arguing. ETA: FWIW, I mean... hard things are hard? It's the normal state of the world that people think they've done the hard thing but are actually just finding excuses to do what they want. People like J.D. Vance decide to be a Catholic, but turns out Jesus' actual teachings are so counter-intuitive that he still doesn't understand them and does them badly. Actually being rational is a difficult, mostly solo activity. Quitting rationalism (or Christianity, or ...) because most of the people around you are just cosplaying is like quitting chess because most of the people around you are just playing around and never get past 1200 ELO. Or like quitting weightlifting because most people around you talk about reps and whatever but never actually push themselves enough to get past their current plateau. Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?

nradov 3mo ago

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

api 3mo ago
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- lyu07282 3mo ago
  Though much more destructive to society than Scientology, it's the cult that is underpinning Technofeudalism, these are people (almost) as vile as Ayn Rand.
  - api 3mo ago
    I'd say rationalism and technofeudalism/neoreaction are adjacent more than directly linked. They seemed to develop in parallel around the same time and involved regulars on some of the same boards.
popalchemist 3mo ago
Indeed, it is literally an ideology.
smitty1e 3mo ago
It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason. Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.
- ip26 3mo ago
  It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.
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Planktonne 3mo ago

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cogman10 3mo ago
Falling for a cult is something that can happen to almost anyone. I think it's somewhat healthy for one to recognize they were in a cult and to share the experience of realizing that and getting out. It may come off as smug, but it's also a pretty vulnerable thing to do as you are admitting "I was duped". The main smugness one can have is thinking they are immune to falling for a cult. Lot's of people do for lots of reasons. It's particularly likely when someone is in a vulnerable position in life (death, depression, major life change). Sometimes people are simply born into the cults and realize later that everything their family and community believes is a lie. Regardless, cults are pretty good at finding and "loving" people into the cult. All this is to say that everyone should take a moment to question their core beliefs. Why do I believe this? Could I be wrong? How would I know I'm wrong? Questions I know I wish I asked and explored earlier in life. The honest answers, though, can be devastating if this part of your identity or family identity.
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  I fully agree with everything you've said, but crucially, I don't think this article, or the others like it, are actually recognising their own vulnerability. The framing isn't 'I fell for this and I was wrong', but 'I am the first one f all of you to see the truth'; there's no humility, no recognition, just the exact same self-delusion, which means they'll fall into the next pit head-first as well.
  - cogman10 3mo ago
    Fair enough. I just have a soft spot for people recognizing that they've been duped. It happened to me personally and I know it's a pretty difficult thing to go through. So I just tend to give a lot of grace even though the person might be an asshole as they deconstruct.

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throwawayffffas 3mo ago

> Of course, as a rational person, you wanted to side with the scientists; if nothing else, it seemed like the winning move. The rational person does not engage with the argument. Because there is nothing to be gained from the argument. The winning move is not to play.

jdw64 3mo ago

Every community has its biases, and everywhere there's a tendency for complex factors to combine and simplify into attractive patterns. In the end, even I can't escape bias. And when I realize how ignorant I am, I feel like I have no choice but to live face to face with how pathetic I am. Even if I'm aware of my bounded rationality and ignorance, there are still moments when I fail to recognize even that ignorance. I feel like I just have to live with the awareness of how contradictory a being I am

pilgrim0 3mo ago
The path of virtue requires we recognize and appreciate the grace that lies in being humbled by our own stupidity.
- oliculipolicula 3mo ago
  And this is why the difficulty of convincing yourself of who downvoted you was a terrible idea of tptacek's ;) I'll admit I won't be entirely able to stick to the virtue of only wanting to find out which of downvoters were justified whenever the situation pops up Nowadays I'll only say that idea was bad BC it's hard (emotionally, at least) to reverse once implemented

greygoo222 3mo ago

This is a pretty low-quality article that didn't give me the impression the author spent any time in the "rationalist community." It's just a list of the few mainstream controversies.

g-b-r 3mo ago
If you say so. I'm sure you're impartial about the matter.

ultrablack 3mo ago

Damore was clearly right though.

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sxp 3mo ago

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3UKmQTKiXjM92p3dtyybtlwt4q3r3lDw/viewanalytics https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U... > What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument. One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoupling-vs-high-decoupling https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...

pavel_lishin 3mo ago
That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.
- alephnerd 3mo ago
  [dead]
- lux-lux-lux 3mo ago
  Well-educated young middle class white men, and with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics. The only real outlier is the openness to HBD/scientific racism stuff.
  - pavel_lishin 3mo ago
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anon-3988 3mo ago

> Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning. So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion. If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas. If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion. All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut. I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.

nialv7 3mo ago
> So they are not rationalist then? one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.
pilgrim0 3mo ago
It’s because of cowardice. Discussing emotions entails being exposed to some degree, but this strain of so called rationality seems rather to be about distancing oneself from the subject in question, which tends to make people feel and behave like arbiters. One could argue that the poets are the real rationalists, at least the good ones. Because there’s no distancing from the truth, just raw and pure content, which is radically different than second order, cheap, hopelessly biased analysis.
henryaj 3mo ago
> This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion This is not true of rationalists! "Straw Vulcan" as a failure mode was talked about fifteen years ago - https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan

bifrost 3mo ago

Oh man I love this: "Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality." So many "things" where its "we're the good guys club and if you're not in our club you're the bad guy".

Tomte 3mo ago
Like "Non-violent communication"

henryaj 3mo ago

Damore wasn't a rationalist but his memo was at least somewhat reasonable, and didn't merit him being cancelled. > From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn Do people do this in practice? 80K for example (EA not rat, but EA is the policy arm of rationalism after all) expressly warn against this. Feels like a strawman.

H8crilA 3mo ago
Yes, those that work in intelligence, sort of. The depth and character of application of this rule depends on a particular country. For example nearly all of them would justify a few murders to keep trade routes open.

jhanschoo 3mo ago

Admittedly I'm quite removed from the Bay Area rationalists, but I get the perception that unlike with many other ideological communities, you could always lay out your countervailing opinion with evidence. You could disagree on many things and still be in conversation with the community. Stuff including early stuff like the Sequences are subject to criticism and reevaluation. If my perception is correct, then imo a community that is (in parts) in critical conversation with itself seems more grounded to me than the usual strongly ideological and religious communities.

rsynnott 3mo ago

The fascinating thing to me about rationalism is that it has its routes in scepticism, and particularly atheistic scepticism, and yet it seems to have evolved into, essentially, the 21st century's first notable religion. (Though in a way that feels a little derivative; I suspect that many of the principals just took _Hyperion_ _way_ too seriously, tbh...)