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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, it is literally an ideology.

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