alt Hacker NewsEvery rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
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moolcool • 04/03/2025
It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
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But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".