4 ms·

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 seriousl

by 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.
  - bigbadfeline 3mo ago
    > It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results. One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept what you're told to accept". The lack of truth isn't due to it being hard or unachievable, there's enough of it to solve all major problems, it's not being pursued because of conflicts of interest.
    - smitty1e 3mo ago
      A third alternative, to quote Dirty Harry, is "A man's got to know his limitations." https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr
    - ip26 3mo ago
      The alternative to the rationalist one is “be suspicious of anyone who claims to know the unarguable truth”
alephnerd 3mo ago
Very much this. I've been to a couple rationalist events in the Bay during peak rationalism (originally with an open mind but eventually resorted to gawking after people couldn't handle "but why..." style questions and prodding which is the norm in my line of work and past academic experience) and it was truly weird seeing supposedly well educated people fall for such obvious cult-like traps. In hindsight, I guess there might have been an overrepresentation of neurodivergence in the community as well, and for some rationalism's simple precepts simply worked - though arguably you can integrate axiomatic thinking and formal logic with traditional religion as well (eg. Nicomachean Ethics or Ashtadhyay). I am a massive supporter for data-driven decision making (heck, much of my undergrad was touching this kind of stuff), but mental models are meant to be tools not a crutch, and overindexing on them causes one to lose sight of the forest when amongst trees. I'd also refute the notion on HN that the movers and shakers of the industry are overrepresented in the community - I actually found the rationalist community to be somewhat marginal in the industry as a whole but overrepresented among a specific type of chronically online individual. Indoor climbing, pickleball, and creative arts (eg. Pottery) are much more representative.
- penguin_booze 3mo ago
  > couple rationalist events Was this run by match.com?
  - zahlman 3mo ago
    "couple of". The preposition is often omitted in casual speech.
zahlman 3mo ago
There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning. The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.
- lyu07282 3mo ago
  You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".
  - zahlman 3mo ago
    > You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? If you say so. That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).
    - bigbadfeline 3mo ago
      > That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. That's so typical, if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms", they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. Dishonesty is the defining feature of that "movement"
      - zahlman 3mo ago
        > It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. It's not a strawman. It's a central example of what I had in mind when I used the word "axiom". > if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms" They don't refer to wild conjectures as axioms. > they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. There is no "blame" going on here. Someone said I sounded like a cult member (which incidentally is insulting and inappropriate on HN; but I thought I would try to steer the discussion back on course) and I correctly explained why that perception is irrelevant. When I said > The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false. That is, in fact, inarguably true. Bayes' Law is an example of that exact sort of thing. If you don't believe that conditional probabilities can be worked out that way, that won't change the fact that conditional probabilities can in fact be worked out that way; and it won't change the fact that in the long run I will be able to exploit your fallacy in games of chance. The other poster gave no example of supposedly false or unsound axioms, so I cannot be strawmanning by failing to respond to them. My assertion is that such false or unsound axioms are not, in fact, in play. The burden of proof lies with those claiming their existence.
mrandish 3mo ago
I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment. Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new orthodoxy in rigidly dogmatic ways, eventually becoming 'a movement' with schisms, in-group/out-group policing, deference to influential members and ostracism for heterodox views.
- ianmarcinkowski 3mo ago
  La dee da! I have convinced myself to donate a kidney to someone I don't know, and also gain clout!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

by 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.
- bigbadfeline 3mo ago
  > It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results. One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept what you're told to accept". The lack of truth isn't due to it being hard or unachievable, there's enough of it to solve all major problems, it's not being pursued because of conflicts of interest.
  - smitty1e 3mo ago
    A third alternative, to quote Dirty Harry, is "A man's got to know his limitations." https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr https://youtu.be/CG2cux_6Rcw?is=44LjSt5DpEhY6BWr
  - ip26 3mo ago
    The alternative to the rationalist one is “be suspicious of anyone who claims to know the unarguable truth”

alephnerd 3mo ago

Very much this. I've been to a couple rationalist events in the Bay during peak rationalism (originally with an open mind but eventually resorted to gawking after people couldn't handle "but why..." style questions and prodding which is the norm in my line of work and past academic experience) and it was truly weird seeing supposedly well educated people fall for such obvious cult-like traps. In hindsight, I guess there might have been an overrepresentation of neurodivergence in the community as well, and for some rationalism's simple precepts simply worked - though arguably you can integrate axiomatic thinking and formal logic with traditional religion as well (eg. Nicomachean Ethics or Ashtadhyay). I am a massive supporter for data-driven decision making (heck, much of my undergrad was touching this kind of stuff), but mental models are meant to be tools not a crutch, and overindexing on them causes one to lose sight of the forest when amongst trees. I'd also refute the notion on HN that the movers and shakers of the industry are overrepresented in the community - I actually found the rationalist community to be somewhat marginal in the industry as a whole but overrepresented among a specific type of chronically online individual. Indoor climbing, pickleball, and creative arts (eg. Pottery) are much more representative.

penguin_booze 3mo ago
> couple rationalist events Was this run by match.com?
- zahlman 3mo ago
  "couple of". The preposition is often omitted in casual speech.

zahlman 3mo ago

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning. The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.

lyu07282 3mo ago
You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".
- zahlman 3mo ago
  > You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? If you say so. That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).
  - bigbadfeline 3mo ago
    > That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. That's so typical, if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms", they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. Dishonesty is the defining feature of that "movement"
    - zahlman 3mo ago
      > It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. It's not a strawman. It's a central example of what I had in mind when I used the word "axiom". > if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms" They don't refer to wild conjectures as axioms. > they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. There is no "blame" going on here. Someone said I sounded like a cult member (which incidentally is insulting and inappropriate on HN; but I thought I would try to steer the discussion back on course) and I correctly explained why that perception is irrelevant. When I said > The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false. That is, in fact, inarguably true. Bayes' Law is an example of that exact sort of thing. If you don't believe that conditional probabilities can be worked out that way, that won't change the fact that conditional probabilities can in fact be worked out that way; and it won't change the fact that in the long run I will be able to exploit your fallacy in games of chance. The other poster gave no example of supposedly false or unsound axioms, so I cannot be strawmanning by failing to respond to them. My assertion is that such false or unsound axioms are not, in fact, in play. The burden of proof lies with those claiming their existence.

mrandish 3mo ago

I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment. Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new orthodoxy in rigidly dogmatic ways, eventually becoming 'a movement' with schisms, in-group/out-group policing, deference to influential members and ostracism for heterodox views.

ianmarcinkowski 3mo ago
La dee da! I have convinced myself to donate a kidney to someone I don't know, and also gain clout!
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]