alt Hacker NewsMy falling-out with the rationalist community
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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.
> 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/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...
> What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the [email protected] 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-decoup...
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)
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
I have very little patience with the regular appearance of articles that follow the below flow.
1. I believe I'm very smart
2. I fell down a rabbit hole into a subculture filled with people who also think they are smart
3. Eventually I realised that they weren't that smart, and were actually most just a fad + spite (+ generally bigotry)
4. I worked this out because I'm very smart, and now I'm here to tell you, people who never fell for it, that that subculture isn't all it claims to be
5. Wow
It never, ever comes with the realisation that maybe the problem is the initial flawed belief and the smugness inherent in it.
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