Sorry rationalists, I still haven't updated my priors about you
The most rational thing to do is to leave the community
I previously wrote about why I'm not a rationalist
The response from some of the rats was glorious, and generally fell into one of two categories:
“Yes we may be annoying, and use unnecessary convoluted language, but at least we don't resort to childish insults.”
“Also, you are low IQ.”
Many were pissy that I pointed out their heroes were not the most vital human beings.
I still think I'm right about that.
These people can't be the face of rationality while being markedly more unhealthy than the average person, no more than I can call myself a finance guru while being broke as shit. Rationality requires the use of executive function in the brain, and the ability to think long-term over short-term — physical health is a litmus test, and many of them fail.
If they were heavy cigarette smokers, crackheads, or gambling addicts, people would rightfully understand my apprehensions about their supposed rationality — as far as I'm concerned, inability to regulate food intake is not so different.
I'm not demanding these people be CrossFit champions — I'm saying that, for all of their sophisticated mental models, if they can't “update their priors” on basic nutrition, then we have what we call in the business an alignment problem.
In other words, while they might not be wrong in their beliefs, I will take into account the fact that their beliefs are clearly downstream from a different set of starting values — or “hyperpriors,” if you like.
Beyond that, several were quite irritated that I was “conflating” the ideas of rationality with that of the community.
To this I say:
As I mentioned in my previous post, the concepts of rationalism are largely fine, but something strange happens when you make rationalism a central part of your identity — the same way that being an atheist is fine, but something weird happens when one becomes a euphoric Reddit atheist.
If I wrote an article talking about how I'm not a men's rights advocate, pointing out that it's disproportionately comprised of Andrew Tate manosphere dorks, very few people would levy the same complaints. I can advocate for men's rights without being a men's rights advocate; I can also strive to be rational without being a rationalist.
Several detractors pointed out that I provided no substitute in terms of how to find the truth. To these people: might I introduce you to the entire field of science? Or are you under the impression that rationalists invented Bayes theorem and p values?
As far as the community goes, the rats have a Sam-Bankman-Fried-autistic-tech-dork problem, the same way the Catholic church has a pedophile problem. If you want people to lay off the ad hominems, then don't make it so easy for them.
Scott Alexander himself “noticed the skulls” of the community in 2017 — and since then it's only gotten worse. Many of these critiques have been going back for quite some time now, including from noted heterosexual economist Noah Smith.
That being said, one comment stuck with me
[This is] precisely why I am not a rationalist. I’d be curious if there was a group that worried about the execution part, called pragmatists or something. Most pragmatists don’t spend their time forming online communities, or writing in-depth articles every week for people to congregate around.
Ironically, this commenter has some of the most well written and in-depth content I've seen on this website. Go figure.
Beyond that, it got me thinking. As of late, it seems that rationalism seems to be going through the same trajectory as New Atheism, in that its growing cultural popularity is simultaneously bringing about its own heat death of importance. I'm sure it'll continue to limp along for the next decade, especially as AI becomes more important in daily life, but overall it seems like the glory days of rationalist blogging have come and gone.
Which naturally raises the question: what comes afterwards?
Well, in order to understand that, we need to talk about…
Julia Galef, the most rational rationalist of all
Galef was once prominent in the online rationalist community. She:
taught a whole bunch of people about Bayes theorem
wrote a book that people still reference to this day
…and then fucked off to go live a life offline.
She hasn’t been online for several years; given her status within the community, it’s possible that she might one day be back — but as things presently stand, I see her as a sort of anti-rationalist.
First of all, she's a woman — or “a Red Gyarados” as they’re known in the rationalist circles.
Second, unlike other members of the community, she realized the most rational thing to do is to step away from the keyboard and go live a regular life.
It reminds me of what people say about mindfulness meditation. Yes, it's pretty nice to go to the mountains of Tibet and spend eight hours a day in some silent retreat. It's also nice to do LSD, contemplating the universe with your ex-girlfriend before explaining to her the plot of Black Lagoon and then having sex (I assume everyone has had this experience).
But after a while, you realize the whole point of mindfulness isn’t really about the serenity of the mountains, or the LSD, or any of the peak experiences. It's about how you feel when Deborah from HR is standing over you and chewing really loudly while telling you about the spa day her poodle went on (once more, I assume this experience is universal).
In other words, it's about those small moments, and living in regular society — the most pragmatic thing of all. So, to double down on what I said in my previous post…
The rationalism and EA community mirror the red pill community…
…in that you should spend some time in it before ultimately moving on.
In fact, the rats also mirror the red pill in that they both have some combination of an autism problem and a sexism problem. (As an autistic sexist, I consider myself an authority on the matter.)
This post explains the problem well.
Unlike red pill sexism, the sexism in EA comes from a different place. As the post points out, many of the people in EA have been rejected by other communities (I wonder why) — and so they have this adverse reaction to discrimination of any kind.
But the problem is, in being so reflexively permissive, they end up creating a different type of discomfort; the rules of engagement within the community become weird and convoluted, where everyone has to be “Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite.” (Jesus Christ these people are allergic to speaking in regular English sentences.)
But how do these rules of engagement cash out? As the woman in the post points out, almost all of the men were quick to invalidate her experience of sexism in the community. Anecdotally, I've heard similar complaints from several other women who regularly hang out with rationalist/EA types.
This is not simply to point out the sexism, but rather to point out that these communities have systematic blind spots, because they're disproportionately composed of a particular kind of person. As a result, they tend to misjudge how they come across to anyone outside of their in-group.
Beyond that, there's a deterioration in the quality of thought from the community in recent years.
The same way Christopher Hitchens atheism became Rick and Morty atheism, the Julia Galef brand of rationality got swapped out for people, with, um, different ideas — which ended up pervading the overall community.
These ideas are extremely niche, and have nothing to do with the concepts originally promoted by the community — ideas that are intertwined with very different subcultures.
On a completely unrelated note, here's a picture of a Nigerian microfinancing startup that I came across. I don’t know how it got here, it must be a copy and paste error.
The point is, after enough conversations start off about cognitive biases and end up about doing grey market ketamine and engaging in, uh, microfinance, you end up thinking to yourself: “yeah, this community is pretty fucking weird. I'm going to go be rational by myself.”
Which brings us back to this comment
I’d be curious if there was a group that worried about the execution part, called pragmatists or something. Most pragmatists don’t spend their time forming online communities, or writing in-depth articles every week for people to congregate around.
I would love for this to be a thing — but I think it ultimately misses the point.
By analogy: there's no such thing as an atheist. It's not a religion — it's just the idea that you don't believe in god.
Similarly, there's no such thing as a rationalist — it's just a spurious collection of concepts, centered around the idea that you try to be right about things. Or, as our fedora wearing friend says, less wrong.
Sure, it makes sense to be part of a group of atheists when you're a tiny cultural minority; the mainstream opposition to these ideas becomes a glue that holds everything together. But now atheism is more or less the dominant paradigm in the cities, so it's not the binding force it once was.
And that's why I say that rationalism is beginning its heat death. Many of the subjects that you would originally find in obscure rationalist corners have now become quite common.
Wine moms now talk about serotonin regulation.
Desk job jockeys talk about the bad incentives of our political / cultural ecosystem.
Everyone knows about large language models.
Hell, even JD fucking Vance reads Scott Alexander.
And so, when enough time passes, the most rational thing to do is copy Julia Galef — you stop being a “rationalist,” and just start being a rational person in regular society. At some point you have to put down the Harry Potter fanfiction, and just start applying the methods of rationality in daily life.
Anyways, I expect the usual responses from the rats
I'll tell you what, I'll issue an apology if you guys can get:
Eliezer to post a video of him doing five full range of motion pull-ups within 72 hours of this post, or
Tyler Cowen to shave his head.
Beyond that, if you're one of those people who got pissed off by reading this, instead of doing the typical move of verbosely screeching about my low IQ, log off, take a deep breath, spend some time with your polycule friends.
You can feel good in the knowledge that your 130 IQ makes you far smarter than I will ever be, because you know how to read the diagonals of a correlation matrix, and I don't.
Indeed, you can always look down on me with sneering superiority, knowing I'll never reach the intellectual heights of you Substack philosophers:
But otherwise, touch grass, as the kids say.
Or if that's not verbose enough for you: consider myelinating your parasympathetic nervous system by eliminating supernormal stimuli via evolutionarily friendly environments.
PS – Miss you Julia, the rats need you — they’re acting really weird right now
ahh julia..
Redpillers are generally former nice guys who found that women were not angels, but humans, and decided to throw an endless hissy-fit about it
Rationalists are generally former geeky bullying victims who found out that they had superior working memory to most of the population, and decided to throw an endless gloating superiority party about it