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
I agree the groups are similar but I also think they both exist for a reason and won’t go away until we answer their underlying points. Redpillers are absolutely correct women are hypergamous and feminism has made forming couples much harder. So called “rationalists” (who are really empiricists who ironically disagreed with the original rationalists) are correct that society should be structured in a rational way because men are by nature rational. However where they both go wrong is they both assume materialism without argument when in reality the world isn’t materialist and materialism is incoherent and can’t account for the mind and rationality. Until we have the courage to say that to both of these groups, they will continue to make valid criticisms
I have been a big fan of this saga. The rats are doing badly man. All the dunking jokes were deserved.
I remember finding the Moloch post when I was like 16 or 17 and I discovered the whole rationalist community. They have had some bangers through the years but after undergoing rigorous mathematical classes I started seeing many of their posts as basically shit.
Mathematics is nice and such, but they work because the universe is determined thus proofs can be checked. When you start applying that to shrimp farms, reducing pain in the world or maximizing number of partners/new experiences it goes south.
This shit started during the french revolution when people thought they could apply reason to arrive at the singular correct moral system. All of this retardery flows from that original idea.
I dont know how to break the news man, but this brand of autism has been going for far longer in France. Descartes and Pascal are probably the first symptoms of this idea. But I think it is an idea really endemic to the french.
They have no natural ressources, they just have people and ideas.
The best redpill forums explicitly said that the purpose of their existence was to make themselves unnecessary. In other words, readers would learn, digest the information, execute on them to the extent it was a natural part of their life, and leave. They weren't designed as a hug-fest.
Where the rationalists go wrong is they want grandiose theories of everything instead of working within a more pragmatic framework of "how can I live an optimal life". Of course, that would lay bare the fact they aren't hyper-rational machines, but people with emotional wants, and make the whole concept come crashing down.
See below. Emotional wants are merely the base of even a hyper-rational machine. It's in defining them as opposed to each other and disconnected that it comes undone. Like trying to claim you'll have a "hyper-mechanical" car that will function as soon as you get rid of the gas tank (or battery).
That's the point though, like using faggot on 4chan. It keeps the unwanted away.
But that's diametrical to a movement that claims to want to universalize their beliefs to everyone, so it's a bit of a, you could say, *irrational* thing to engage in.
~~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~~
Let me really throw the gasoline on the fire:
EVERYONE is a rationalists (save a very few actually crazy people).
Rationality is a process. You can't prove or argue to be rational any more than you can use logic to justify logic. It's basically the process we all take to accomplish a goal we have.
Let's start with a super simple example: is it rational for me to eat?
If I state nothing else, you literally cannot answer the question. It's only answerable by adding goals to the equation. If i have a goal of survival, then yes, it is rational for me to eat. If I have a goal of weigh loss, then no, it is NOT rational for me to eat. But like numbers in math, you can't prove or justify goals rationally, they are a necessary precondition.
This is why a lot of arguments end up breaking down. Life is made up of a lot of goals - and time permits us only to do a few of them. What makes us unique from each other is our own personal sorting of those goals. When people accuse others of being irrational, at heart every time is the fact that the other person's sorting of goals do not match the accuser's. One man does not want to jump off a bridge because for him, survival is paramount. Another man does jump off a bridge because he has a bungee cord tied to his legs and he wants to experience the rush and thrill of it all. Is either man irrational? No, they are both rational. "You could die!" says the first. "Are you really living?" asks the second.
(And yes, part of what drives politics crazy is not only this collision of different sort priority on goals, but that sometimes even a person's goals will conflict with other goals. That doesn't make people irrational - that's just life.)
Or as one guy put it once: There is a god, his name is Trade-Offs.
Briefly put, it's not "rational" to expect anyone to know every single variable. That's why your average person will "rationally" narrow things down based on their own needs.
And that's exactly when the rationalist jumps in with their 150 IQ take, tearing down the supposedly irrational person because they can't even conceive of the possibility that other goals or needs might exist beyond their own.
But of course, rationalist ideology can't allow something to be right and wrong at the same time.
I could link a bunch of examples where this has happened, but I think anyone reading this has probably run into cases like that already.
And of course, the reason it ends up devolving on the Internet is that people take what should be a clear and basic taxonomy and begin to apply it as a "good/bad" label. "I am rationalist" starts to become "I am good." "You are being irrational" soon becomes "You are bad." Doesn't matter what the original purpose of the label was or how useful it was.
You want to make sure you don't get locked in a bubble - rigorously fight this tendency in yourself. (we all do it) Don't dismiss an enemy with words like "they're just being irrational." If you want to understand them, take a moment, really listen, and figure out what their goals are. When you realize that, they're actions will then make rational sense. (And I mean their ACTUAL goal. Claiming "they just hate X" or "are just evil" or "want you to suffer" are not real goals.)
This doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It doesn't even mean you have to change your mind or your own goals. But so many political discussions nowadays are fruitless because one or both sides spends more time talking past each other than actually understanding each other.
I’ve got something similar to my Schelling post coming out (maybe) tomorrow on American and Russian diplomacy. I’ll discuss a little known political theory that uses culture and history to explain the national interest.
No one here respond to my comment or subscribe to me if you can’t do 25 pushups please.
"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 are referring to clergy, 2% are pedos.
I'd estimate that more than 2% of rationalists are tech dorks, so no it's not the same.
There is only one religious denomination that provokes a response like yours. If someone says "Catholic", someone else is bound to respond "pedophile."
But child sexual abuse is everywhere. If you feel the need to respond "pedo" at any mention of "Catholic," why don't you respond the same when public schools are mentioned? There are more pedos in schools than among Catholic clergy.
American protestants are always looking for a way to malign the Catholic church. The KKK destroyed the tabernacle and the altar of my church in New Jersey, in the 1990's.
If being against pedophilia isn't enough for you, and you also have to single out Catholics as being worthy of scorn, you have an ulterior motive, and it might have to do with the fact that your pastor told you that the Catholic church is the Whore of Babylon or some shit. It's no different that saying all Democrats are pedos high on adrenochrome, it's just slander.
The adhom serves as an excellent way of filtering faggots out of your community. If you can’t make big brain posts while expertly dunking on your opponent then get the fuck out. I want to look at someone not only obliterating a persons arguments but the person making them.
If you don’t have the emotional maturity to take it on the chin and laugh it off then don’t step into the ring. People unable to properly regulate their emotions should be removed from any community trying to find the truth of things.
This idea that you can separate an argument fully from the weasel making them is profoundly unhealthly. No you fucking faggot you can’t just bandy around whatever arguments are hip and fresh to farm likes.
Tldr: if your intellectual movement is full of redditors it will produce reddit ass takes no matter what.
Good response, I think it cleared some things up. The responses to the original article seem to have taken "why I'm not a rationalist" as "why rationalism is wrong". They're treating rationalism as a fixed ideology and not a community of people and a collective identity. The vast majority of people, if they have a rudimentary understanding of probability, would support the use of bayesian statistics in policymaking, and in forming their own opinions. Being a Rationalist simply means "I imagine myself to be very devoted to this practice, plus I am a utilitarian". But, saying "why I am not a utilitarian" is a completely different thing.
Rationalism originally referred to the belief that certain truths were able to be determined from reason alone, without outside observation. Today, it means something more close to the opposite.
I have a half-written post about The Practical Party, a new political party that will gather the pragmatists, but I guess I'm having my own procrastination party because I don't think it would really take off.
ahh julia..
I would estimate that about 60% of my most-liked stuff (comments, notes, posts) is me just repeating her advice
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
I agree the groups are similar but I also think they both exist for a reason and won’t go away until we answer their underlying points. Redpillers are absolutely correct women are hypergamous and feminism has made forming couples much harder. So called “rationalists” (who are really empiricists who ironically disagreed with the original rationalists) are correct that society should be structured in a rational way because men are by nature rational. However where they both go wrong is they both assume materialism without argument when in reality the world isn’t materialist and materialism is incoherent and can’t account for the mind and rationality. Until we have the courage to say that to both of these groups, they will continue to make valid criticisms
It’s only a real rationalism if leads to an ai doomsday sex cult anything else is just sparkling logic.
I have been a big fan of this saga. The rats are doing badly man. All the dunking jokes were deserved.
I remember finding the Moloch post when I was like 16 or 17 and I discovered the whole rationalist community. They have had some bangers through the years but after undergoing rigorous mathematical classes I started seeing many of their posts as basically shit.
Mathematics is nice and such, but they work because the universe is determined thus proofs can be checked. When you start applying that to shrimp farms, reducing pain in the world or maximizing number of partners/new experiences it goes south.
This shit started during the french revolution when people thought they could apply reason to arrive at the singular correct moral system. All of this retardery flows from that original idea.
I dont know how to break the news man, but this brand of autism has been going for far longer in France. Descartes and Pascal are probably the first symptoms of this idea. But I think it is an idea really endemic to the french.
They have no natural ressources, they just have people and ideas.
The best redpill forums explicitly said that the purpose of their existence was to make themselves unnecessary. In other words, readers would learn, digest the information, execute on them to the extent it was a natural part of their life, and leave. They weren't designed as a hug-fest.
Where the rationalists go wrong is they want grandiose theories of everything instead of working within a more pragmatic framework of "how can I live an optimal life". Of course, that would lay bare the fact they aren't hyper-rational machines, but people with emotional wants, and make the whole concept come crashing down.
See below. Emotional wants are merely the base of even a hyper-rational machine. It's in defining them as opposed to each other and disconnected that it comes undone. Like trying to claim you'll have a "hyper-mechanical" car that will function as soon as you get rid of the gas tank (or battery).
God the jargon alone is so off-putting.
That's the point though, like using faggot on 4chan. It keeps the unwanted away.
But that's diametrical to a movement that claims to want to universalize their beliefs to everyone, so it's a bit of a, you could say, *irrational* thing to engage in.
~~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~~
Let me really throw the gasoline on the fire:
EVERYONE is a rationalists (save a very few actually crazy people).
Rationality is a process. You can't prove or argue to be rational any more than you can use logic to justify logic. It's basically the process we all take to accomplish a goal we have.
Let's start with a super simple example: is it rational for me to eat?
If I state nothing else, you literally cannot answer the question. It's only answerable by adding goals to the equation. If i have a goal of survival, then yes, it is rational for me to eat. If I have a goal of weigh loss, then no, it is NOT rational for me to eat. But like numbers in math, you can't prove or justify goals rationally, they are a necessary precondition.
This is why a lot of arguments end up breaking down. Life is made up of a lot of goals - and time permits us only to do a few of them. What makes us unique from each other is our own personal sorting of those goals. When people accuse others of being irrational, at heart every time is the fact that the other person's sorting of goals do not match the accuser's. One man does not want to jump off a bridge because for him, survival is paramount. Another man does jump off a bridge because he has a bungee cord tied to his legs and he wants to experience the rush and thrill of it all. Is either man irrational? No, they are both rational. "You could die!" says the first. "Are you really living?" asks the second.
(And yes, part of what drives politics crazy is not only this collision of different sort priority on goals, but that sometimes even a person's goals will conflict with other goals. That doesn't make people irrational - that's just life.)
Or as one guy put it once: There is a god, his name is Trade-Offs.
Briefly put, it's not "rational" to expect anyone to know every single variable. That's why your average person will "rationally" narrow things down based on their own needs.
And that's exactly when the rationalist jumps in with their 150 IQ take, tearing down the supposedly irrational person because they can't even conceive of the possibility that other goals or needs might exist beyond their own.
But of course, rationalist ideology can't allow something to be right and wrong at the same time.
I could link a bunch of examples where this has happened, but I think anyone reading this has probably run into cases like that already.
And of course, the reason it ends up devolving on the Internet is that people take what should be a clear and basic taxonomy and begin to apply it as a "good/bad" label. "I am rationalist" starts to become "I am good." "You are being irrational" soon becomes "You are bad." Doesn't matter what the original purpose of the label was or how useful it was.
You want to make sure you don't get locked in a bubble - rigorously fight this tendency in yourself. (we all do it) Don't dismiss an enemy with words like "they're just being irrational." If you want to understand them, take a moment, really listen, and figure out what their goals are. When you realize that, they're actions will then make rational sense. (And I mean their ACTUAL goal. Claiming "they just hate X" or "are just evil" or "want you to suffer" are not real goals.)
This doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It doesn't even mean you have to change your mind or your own goals. But so many political discussions nowadays are fruitless because one or both sides spends more time talking past each other than actually understanding each other.
“Why aren’t you a rationalist?!?”
Phrenology. Physiognomy. 😎
More seriously, thank you for the shoutout.
I’ve got something similar to my Schelling post coming out (maybe) tomorrow on American and Russian diplomacy. I’ll discuss a little known political theory that uses culture and history to explain the national interest.
No one here respond to my comment or subscribe to me if you can’t do 25 pushups please.
"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 are referring to clergy, 2% are pedos.
I'd estimate that more than 2% of rationalists are tech dorks, so no it's not the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Southern_Baptist_churchesSexual abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches - Wikipedia
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/over-2000-people-abused-german-protestant-church-study-2024-01-25/Over 2,000 people abused in German Protestant Church - study | Reuters
There is only one religious denomination that provokes a response like yours. If someone says "Catholic", someone else is bound to respond "pedophile."
But child sexual abuse is everywhere. If you feel the need to respond "pedo" at any mention of "Catholic," why don't you respond the same when public schools are mentioned? There are more pedos in schools than among Catholic clergy.
American protestants are always looking for a way to malign the Catholic church. The KKK destroyed the tabernacle and the altar of my church in New Jersey, in the 1990's.
If being against pedophilia isn't enough for you, and you also have to single out Catholics as being worthy of scorn, you have an ulterior motive, and it might have to do with the fact that your pastor told you that the Catholic church is the Whore of Babylon or some shit. It's no different that saying all Democrats are pedos high on adrenochrome, it's just slander.
How do we know it’s only 2%? And if it’s that low, why the pervasive coverup?
How much of this behavior is just low-T? The polyamory just screams it.
Makes an even stronger case for exercise and nutrition, beyond general physical fitness.
The idea that you can separate an argument completely from the person making it needs to die.
Only caring about who is making it can also be stupid. There has to be a happy medium in the middle somewhere.
The adhom serves as an excellent way of filtering faggots out of your community. If you can’t make big brain posts while expertly dunking on your opponent then get the fuck out. I want to look at someone not only obliterating a persons arguments but the person making them.
If you don’t have the emotional maturity to take it on the chin and laugh it off then don’t step into the ring. People unable to properly regulate their emotions should be removed from any community trying to find the truth of things.
This idea that you can separate an argument fully from the weasel making them is profoundly unhealthly. No you fucking faggot you can’t just bandy around whatever arguments are hip and fresh to farm likes.
Tldr: if your intellectual movement is full of redditors it will produce reddit ass takes no matter what.
Good response, I think it cleared some things up. The responses to the original article seem to have taken "why I'm not a rationalist" as "why rationalism is wrong". They're treating rationalism as a fixed ideology and not a community of people and a collective identity. The vast majority of people, if they have a rudimentary understanding of probability, would support the use of bayesian statistics in policymaking, and in forming their own opinions. Being a Rationalist simply means "I imagine myself to be very devoted to this practice, plus I am a utilitarian". But, saying "why I am not a utilitarian" is a completely different thing.
Rationalism originally referred to the belief that certain truths were able to be determined from reason alone, without outside observation. Today, it means something more close to the opposite.
Be angry at the sun if such things make you angry, I guess. But maybe you just need to be, you know, a little bit less online.
I do wholeheartedly agree about the importance of keeping in shape.
Everyone who’s ever had a LessWrong account should be Flayed and thrown into the Great Salt Lake.
Harsh but honest.
I think I pretty much proved that you can dismiss rationalists by calling them retarded and there's nothing they can do about it.
You can see the full dialogue between myself, Richard Hanania, and Scott Alexander in my Notes if you'd like.
I have a half-written post about The Practical Party, a new political party that will gather the pragmatists, but I guess I'm having my own procrastination party because I don't think it would really take off.
I'll start the Procrastination Party next year, when I get around to it.