"To be fair, you need a very high IQ to understand Eliezer. He is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the concept handles will go over a persons head."
For any 'movement', there tends to be a core of cool, smart people that form a 'community'. Then, over time, due to market forces, network effects, and evaporative cooling, the people who are left are not as interesting, too ideologically fixed, more neurotic than average—and, yes, tend to be losers.
Rationalists suffer from a kind of 'productive insulation' because they understand systems far better than people, whereas the opposite is generally the case in the larger general population. Makes for easy access to a kind of effective arbitrage with a high, but brutal ceiling.
That said, this problem is quite easily corrected, at least to a certain degree. Take them out of Fairfax or Berkley, etc. and force them to live by only the fruit of their own wits in Bozeman or Indianapolis, or even Chengdu or Kolkata, etc. for three years. They would be forced to either drop their pretensions or suffer an inconceivable amount of cognitive dissonance.
The problem is what you call productive insulation imo is still insulation, while they understand systems better than people, a human society is not systems but people. While early on their pure focus on materialism/rationalism brings some really interesting insights into systems and hidden mechanisms, the more they double down, they more "degenerate" (hereby used as disconnected from true reality) they become and the less predictive power their mental models or ideas have.
I agree with your ideas, and I would take it even further, drop them in Africa and let their ideas go.
But it still makes them more useful for understanding systems. Discount all the paperclippery and you still have The Zvi's excellent rundowns of which AI versions are better for which tasks. Who are you going to listen to, the companies tooting their own horns?
I'm happy rationalists are around. I'm not eager to become one, at least not 100%.
Rationalists are the best counterexample to the assumption that IQ is all that matters.
I was about to say they're too clever for their own good, but true intelligence begins when you realize you've been indulging in intellectual self-gratification.
To call back to the post: in olden times this was distinguished as intelligence vs WISDOM. hence the old joke: intellect is knowing the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.
“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
― Aristotle
Or like... Proverbs 8.
Obviously it would be phrased a bit what with our ancestors speaking different languages, but a lot of those languages do seem to have distinguished terms for things like "knowing" and "understanding."
The joke is that everyone loves to talk about intelligence and wisdom to make fun of nerds...but the use of the particular terms 'intelligence' and 'wisdom' to draw that particular contrast, as far as I can tell, seems to originate with Dungeons & Dragons, which used to be the nerdiest thing you can do. ;)
Google Ngrams shows both terms showing an uptick around 2000, which is about when kids who played the first edition would be starting to enter early middle age and therefore positions of influence. But I could be way off. ;)
Without the excesses and largesse of the Bay Area, there would be no "rationalist" subculture. It's all downstream of a reality distortion field that showered wealth on people too young and naive to know what it really meant. The means of wealth production they benefited from depend on mastery of shibboleths and ideologies that please the actual sources of the wealth. They've become epiphytes, basically.
But what is this Reality Distortion field? I understand the stereotype that wealthy people tend to be out of touch— but i struggle to see how a rural West Virginian understands anything better than the average rationalist besides perhaps what it is like to be… a rural West Virginian
I think it's less that West Virginians are smarter than Rats, and more that they simply occupy different niches. The problem mostly comes from the wealth allowing adherents to extrapolate certain beliefs into universal laws.
I generally see what you’re saying. I agree that rationalists tend to frame the world in a universal, empirical sort of way that ignores a lot of context/nuance and makes sweeping claims about groups/lifestyles they know nothing about.
However, I would posit that their hit rate is still higher than most all other groups— and I dont think cultural ignorance can preclude that. For instance: the West Virginian who is corn-fed and has been exercising their whole life understands the value of physical activity more than the soy rationalist on a tacit level, but that doesn’t make the rationalist any less wrong (haha) in their scientific understandings of human anatomy they learn in pursuit of health optimization.
Oh yeah, 100% agreed. The critics who think the rats have no redeeming qualities are reacting to a caricature. (For the record, I've read the LW sequences, and i've been hanging out on SCC/ACX for probably about a decade at this point. I wouldn't be there if i thought they had no redeeming qualities. I recognize Anonymous Dude as a regular, as well.)
Regarding the nature of the reality distortion field, there's like 5 different things that come to mind. I'm just going to write a quick post at this point. (The moldbug explainer probably won't be for a while. I have writer's block and there's a bunch of prerequisites to explain and my take is completely schizo. sorry.)
That is already something concrete to understand - and with far more usable applications. Rationalists don't understand anything, least of all themselves
With academia completely taken over by the left and in particular by an entirely blank-slate dogma, rationalist bloggers are one of the few places you can find social-science thinking that doesn't have the same particular political point of view and assumptions: white man bad, all differences are socially constructed, we must completely destroy all power structures created before the 1960s, you can think of a few more. Reinventing the wheel is silly in many ways, but it's also what smart people are going to do when they have to restart thinking outside of academia. They have their own biases, of course, many of which you list at length.
But that's why you read more than one thing. I read the NYT; I read the WSJ; I read al-Jazeera. I read Astral Codex Ten. I make up my own mind; I'm not always right, but at least I can say I made the effort.
I'm rat-adjacent, but I won't really offer much of a defense. You're essentially correct: They're nerds. The concept is well described.
They have a different set of problems from the more bro-ish guys, but they're real. I don't take them that seriously (and the few people I have met at meetups don't seem to either). They keep me up to date on AI, they're interesting to talk about politics with because they're roughly where I am between the woke and MAGA poles politically and pretty similar affectively, and that's it. Utilitarianism, paperclips, econ bloggers, Schelling points, well, they have their sillinesses but they don't piss me off as much as right-wingers trying to impose their religion on everyone or left-wingers whining about cishet white men. Besides, I remember Bayes and Kolmogorov from math class in college so it gives me the warm fuzzies. (Yes, it doesn't work mathematically IRL because in most real-life decisions you can rarely calculate more than one of P(A), P(B), P(AB), P(A|B), and P(B|A). ) If you're an Xennial ex-liberal nerd they're congenial, even if they don't have the secrets of the universe. I don't really think anyone does these days.
That said I've been to meetups; it's a chance to go drinking with a few right-of-center nerds and sometimes talk about topics you can't talk about with other people in real life. And that's good enough for me.
Though you may have finally convinced me to go the gym. ;)
> don't piss me off as much as right-wingers trying to impose their religion on everyone or left-wingers whining about cishet white men
This is kind of revealing, though, right?
Rationalists insist that their models of the world are the best and their causes are most important (to be fair, which group doesn't?), but most others don't treat their rhetoric as seriously as the actions of other groups.
Why? Because there is an implicit recognition that rationalists are pretty hopeless at organizing and driving masses of people well, and so they pose less of a threat to established power, either in good or bad ways.
The pen may be mightier than the sword (questionable), except the limbic system is definitely mightier than the pen.
You know, you're right. I've implicitly discounted their importance and therefore don't view them as a threat. I guess if I thought they were going to ban meat-eating or take my money through taxes for shrimp welfare I'd hate them more.
The pen is definitely weaker than the sword, the thing is usually in states the government has all the swords so the pen is your best recourse.
The limbic system is mightier than the cerebral cortex, which gives the orders to the pen.
There is in fact a whole burgeoning natalist contingent. TheZvi at least posts on it.
I think they just got to an age they wanted kids. And I'm not the first to say that.
Yeah, it could go on for ages. But I'd say although it initially spread by the preached word, it had to defend and consolidate itself by the sword. Of course it appeals heavily to the limbic system--any successful religion does. And plenty of disputation to suck in the Scott Alexander types--I don't know what else you'd call Thomas Aquinas.
And I think you've given me the analogy I'm looking for--rationalism's a useful tool, it's a poor religion. (Though better than most of the cults that have popped up over the years--they don't try to take all your money, force you to have sex with the leader, or make you kill yourself.)
As for the polycules...supposedly it works better. My best guess is there aren't a lot of women to go around in nerd spaces so the guys have to share. I observed this in my own nerd peer group back in the late 90s and they messed around with polyamory way before LessWrong was a thing.
"An example of the use of wisdom can be given by noting that while the intelligent character will know that smoking is harmful to him, he may well lack the wisdom to stop (this writer may well fall into this category)." --Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master's Guide, p. 15 (1st edition)
> If Eliezer Yudkowsky is so logical, why is he so fat?
Haven't "knowing" and "executing well" ALWAYS been separate magisteria, with the ones who can reliably bridge them rarer and rarer the more domains they can bridge them in?
If any given person is so smart, why aren't they making $500k at a FAANG job? All you have to do is go to a T20 school for STEM and get a good internship! Just 2 steps!
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.
> I’d be curious if there was a group that worried about the execution part, called pragmatists or something.
Yeah, there's the fun question. All the actual "pragmatists" of this flavor I know, who are good at executing across multiple things and focus more on praxis than theory, I've met doing things. Construction company owners, car racing guys, triathlon peeps, etc.
I don't think there's an overarching "techne enthusiast" community, because people are usually only really good executors in 1-3 domains. But I personally think it would be awesome, and would love to go to those meetups.
"Against Rationalism, For Meta-Rationality, Evidence, and Experience, Part 1
Foundations, and, why is Eliezer Yudkovsky fat and the Zizians nutty?"
And I have a Math PhD so I don't worry , your understanding is on solid ground :P
A couple of additional points:
1) For people supposed to be well versed in Economics, to be devoted to utilitarianism doesn't make sense. Behavioral Economics (Kahneman and others) showed that humans don't have closed form utility functions, and so summing utilities isn't well defined. But there is a whole field of Welfare Economics which describes more sensible and well behaved quantification of well being when considering the outcomes of policies.
2) And for people who seem to like Nietzsche, they should know this quote illustrating your (our) point about the limitations of not having real world experience:
"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy"
I agree with a lot of these critiques, but on-balance I still like rationalism a lot. It's not like they'll excommunicate you for working out and dating people, or for not using jargon, or for ceding certain things as unquantifiable. That still leaves all the other aspects of rationalism that I like. This is a good article, but it's not a strong case for not being a rationalist, in my view.
I'd see it as a spectrum--you can read the big people and go to meetups but you don't have to believe everything they say. Yes on updating your priors, no on shrimp welfare.
And I don't think they're actually *against* exercise, they just don't bother.
I think you can blame the ideology for undesirable behaviours if the behaviors are defensible within the ideological framework.
But I don't think that's the case here. "Use jargon" and "don't work out" and "reinvent known concepts" and "quantify the unquantifiable" are not principles of rationalism. They're just flaws that the personality types drawn to it are more likely to exhibit.
I love this post but I have a minor quibble with this near the end:
"Tyler Cowen helped start a new branch of studies called “progress studies” – which is supposedly meant to gain an appreciation of how society changes over time. Now if that sounds familiar to you, that's because it’s that’s the entire fucking point of history."
The problem is that academic history has stopped studying progress and prefers to study the evils of colonialism and whether William Shakespeare was a gay black woman. If you are in or close to academia then the historians you interact with are not doing progress studies. If, by some mischance, they do study something that was progress they find a way to report on the negatives and ignore the fact that it raised wages, improved health etc. For example when Britain started the industrial revolution peasants voluntarily moved to work in factories because it was a better life than semi-subsistence agriculture being generally indoors and having food and drink readily available, but a historian will concentrate on the relatively rare enclosures and the poor living conditions in the factory towns without noticing that the rural peasant living conditions were generally worse...
So yeah having progress studies separate from history makes sense give the decline of the study of history in history departments
Maybe it's just because of the overlaps with Tech Bros and Finance guys, or selection effects because of my own fitness, but most of the Rationalist folk I know are notably more fit than most?
Sure, the headline guys like Scott and Zvi aren't, but they're probably below median weight for Americans, and the GMU guys are def below median overweight / obese for Americans. Eliezer is about average for an American.
Like there's a certain high income systematizing type of guy that overlaps with Rats who is That Guy at the gym who knows about macros and mesocycles and reads Renaissance Periodization stuff or does serious swimming / running / biking.
This was a very convincing deconstruction of the rationalist mindset.
"When all you have is a very high IQ brain, everything looks like a complex problem."
To be frank I think neologisms are part of fostering a sense of community, and are essential to developing an identity (in-group signaling), it's just that they tend to references more complex things than what you find in your average online community.
>When you're smart enough, you get really good at rationalizing things.
> I always found it strange that there was such an adjacency between the rationalist community and economics bloggers, especially the dorks from George Mason University. But it starts to make sense when you realize how heavily concentrated they are in certain parts of the country, and in certain industries.
You've got the causality backwards. The rationalist community initially coalesced around Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson's group blog. It's adjacent to the GMU blogosphere because it literally emerged from it.
For any 'movement', there tends to be a core of cool, smart people that form a 'community'. Then, over time, due to market forces, network effects, and evaporative cooling, the people who are left are not as interesting, too ideologically fixed, more neurotic than average—and, yes, tend to be losers.
https://x.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1935418815363358742
Rationalists suffer from a kind of 'productive insulation' because they understand systems far better than people, whereas the opposite is generally the case in the larger general population. Makes for easy access to a kind of effective arbitrage with a high, but brutal ceiling.
That said, this problem is quite easily corrected, at least to a certain degree. Take them out of Fairfax or Berkley, etc. and force them to live by only the fruit of their own wits in Bozeman or Indianapolis, or even Chengdu or Kolkata, etc. for three years. They would be forced to either drop their pretensions or suffer an inconceivable amount of cognitive dissonance.
The problem is what you call productive insulation imo is still insulation, while they understand systems better than people, a human society is not systems but people. While early on their pure focus on materialism/rationalism brings some really interesting insights into systems and hidden mechanisms, the more they double down, they more "degenerate" (hereby used as disconnected from true reality) they become and the less predictive power their mental models or ideas have.
I agree with your ideas, and I would take it even further, drop them in Africa and let their ideas go.
But it still makes them more useful for understanding systems. Discount all the paperclippery and you still have The Zvi's excellent rundowns of which AI versions are better for which tasks. Who are you going to listen to, the companies tooting their own horns?
I'm happy rationalists are around. I'm not eager to become one, at least not 100%.
Rationalists are the best counterexample to the assumption that IQ is all that matters.
I was about to say they're too clever for their own good, but true intelligence begins when you realize you've been indulging in intellectual self-gratification.
To call back to the post: in olden times this was distinguished as intelligence vs WISDOM. hence the old joke: intellect is knowing the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.
True. Though I always wonder how much that particular distinction between faculties extends back before 1974. ;)
“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
― Aristotle
Or like... Proverbs 8.
Obviously it would be phrased a bit what with our ancestors speaking different languages, but a lot of those languages do seem to have distinguished terms for things like "knowing" and "understanding."
Oh, I agree! It was a joke.
The joke is that everyone loves to talk about intelligence and wisdom to make fun of nerds...but the use of the particular terms 'intelligence' and 'wisdom' to draw that particular contrast, as far as I can tell, seems to originate with Dungeons & Dragons, which used to be the nerdiest thing you can do. ;)
Google Ngrams shows both terms showing an uptick around 2000, which is about when kids who played the first edition would be starting to enter early middle age and therefore positions of influence. But I could be way off. ;)
lol OH! I gotcha.
Unfortunately the Internet has ruined a lot of humor. Sometimes you really can’t tell whether someone is joking or really doesn’t know any more.
Now if you want to discuss D&D and history….
What did you have in mind? ;)
Without the excesses and largesse of the Bay Area, there would be no "rationalist" subculture. It's all downstream of a reality distortion field that showered wealth on people too young and naive to know what it really meant. The means of wealth production they benefited from depend on mastery of shibboleths and ideologies that please the actual sources of the wealth. They've become epiphytes, basically.
Insightful thought, didn’t think about the new money aspect
But what is this Reality Distortion field? I understand the stereotype that wealthy people tend to be out of touch— but i struggle to see how a rural West Virginian understands anything better than the average rationalist besides perhaps what it is like to be… a rural West Virginian
I think it's less that West Virginians are smarter than Rats, and more that they simply occupy different niches. The problem mostly comes from the wealth allowing adherents to extrapolate certain beliefs into universal laws.
I generally see what you’re saying. I agree that rationalists tend to frame the world in a universal, empirical sort of way that ignores a lot of context/nuance and makes sweeping claims about groups/lifestyles they know nothing about.
However, I would posit that their hit rate is still higher than most all other groups— and I dont think cultural ignorance can preclude that. For instance: the West Virginian who is corn-fed and has been exercising their whole life understands the value of physical activity more than the soy rationalist on a tacit level, but that doesn’t make the rationalist any less wrong (haha) in their scientific understandings of human anatomy they learn in pursuit of health optimization.
Oh yeah, 100% agreed. The critics who think the rats have no redeeming qualities are reacting to a caricature. (For the record, I've read the LW sequences, and i've been hanging out on SCC/ACX for probably about a decade at this point. I wouldn't be there if i thought they had no redeeming qualities. I recognize Anonymous Dude as a regular, as well.)
Regarding the nature of the reality distortion field, there's like 5 different things that come to mind. I'm just going to write a quick post at this point. (The moldbug explainer probably won't be for a while. I have writer's block and there's a bunch of prerequisites to explain and my take is completely schizo. sorry.)
That is already something concrete to understand - and with far more usable applications. Rationalists don't understand anything, least of all themselves
Well, one thing I would say in their defense:
With academia completely taken over by the left and in particular by an entirely blank-slate dogma, rationalist bloggers are one of the few places you can find social-science thinking that doesn't have the same particular political point of view and assumptions: white man bad, all differences are socially constructed, we must completely destroy all power structures created before the 1960s, you can think of a few more. Reinventing the wheel is silly in many ways, but it's also what smart people are going to do when they have to restart thinking outside of academia. They have their own biases, of course, many of which you list at length.
But that's why you read more than one thing. I read the NYT; I read the WSJ; I read al-Jazeera. I read Astral Codex Ten. I make up my own mind; I'm not always right, but at least I can say I made the effort.
I'm rat-adjacent, but I won't really offer much of a defense. You're essentially correct: They're nerds. The concept is well described.
They have a different set of problems from the more bro-ish guys, but they're real. I don't take them that seriously (and the few people I have met at meetups don't seem to either). They keep me up to date on AI, they're interesting to talk about politics with because they're roughly where I am between the woke and MAGA poles politically and pretty similar affectively, and that's it. Utilitarianism, paperclips, econ bloggers, Schelling points, well, they have their sillinesses but they don't piss me off as much as right-wingers trying to impose their religion on everyone or left-wingers whining about cishet white men. Besides, I remember Bayes and Kolmogorov from math class in college so it gives me the warm fuzzies. (Yes, it doesn't work mathematically IRL because in most real-life decisions you can rarely calculate more than one of P(A), P(B), P(AB), P(A|B), and P(B|A). ) If you're an Xennial ex-liberal nerd they're congenial, even if they don't have the secrets of the universe. I don't really think anyone does these days.
That said I've been to meetups; it's a chance to go drinking with a few right-of-center nerds and sometimes talk about topics you can't talk about with other people in real life. And that's good enough for me.
Though you may have finally convinced me to go the gym. ;)
> don't piss me off as much as right-wingers trying to impose their religion on everyone or left-wingers whining about cishet white men
This is kind of revealing, though, right?
Rationalists insist that their models of the world are the best and their causes are most important (to be fair, which group doesn't?), but most others don't treat their rhetoric as seriously as the actions of other groups.
Why? Because there is an implicit recognition that rationalists are pretty hopeless at organizing and driving masses of people well, and so they pose less of a threat to established power, either in good or bad ways.
The pen may be mightier than the sword (questionable), except the limbic system is definitely mightier than the pen.
You know, you're right. I've implicitly discounted their importance and therefore don't view them as a threat. I guess if I thought they were going to ban meat-eating or take my money through taxes for shrimp welfare I'd hate them more.
The pen is definitely weaker than the sword, the thing is usually in states the government has all the swords so the pen is your best recourse.
The limbic system is mightier than the cerebral cortex, which gives the orders to the pen.
What is the actual rationalist justification for polycules, though? Are these people not even slightly concerned with TFR data?
One could argue the emergence of Christianity was a pretty good example of pens being mightier than swords, although that's a separate topic.
There is in fact a whole burgeoning natalist contingent. TheZvi at least posts on it.
I think they just got to an age they wanted kids. And I'm not the first to say that.
Yeah, it could go on for ages. But I'd say although it initially spread by the preached word, it had to defend and consolidate itself by the sword. Of course it appeals heavily to the limbic system--any successful religion does. And plenty of disputation to suck in the Scott Alexander types--I don't know what else you'd call Thomas Aquinas.
And I think you've given me the analogy I'm looking for--rationalism's a useful tool, it's a poor religion. (Though better than most of the cults that have popped up over the years--they don't try to take all your money, force you to have sex with the leader, or make you kill yourself.)
As for the polycules...supposedly it works better. My best guess is there aren't a lot of women to go around in nerd spaces so the guys have to share. I observed this in my own nerd peer group back in the late 90s and they messed around with polyamory way before LessWrong was a thing.
s/rationalist/libertarian/g and you describe a well known phenomenon
I think there's a fair degree of cross over between the two so that's not so surprising
Yeah, I would agree. There's a certain personality type they both appeal to.
> If Eliezer Yudkowsky is so logical, why is he so fat?
"An example of the use of wisdom can be given by noting that while the intelligent character will know that smoking is harmful to him, he may well lack the wisdom to stop (this writer may well fall into this category)." --Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master's Guide, p. 15 (1st edition)
> If Eliezer Yudkowsky is so logical, why is he so fat?
Haven't "knowing" and "executing well" ALWAYS been separate magisteria, with the ones who can reliably bridge them rarer and rarer the more domains they can bridge them in?
If any given person is so smart, why aren't they making $500k at a FAANG job? All you have to do is go to a T20 school for STEM and get a good internship! Just 2 steps!
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.
> I’d be curious if there was a group that worried about the execution part, called pragmatists or something.
Yeah, there's the fun question. All the actual "pragmatists" of this flavor I know, who are good at executing across multiple things and focus more on praxis than theory, I've met doing things. Construction company owners, car racing guys, triathlon peeps, etc.
I don't think there's an overarching "techne enthusiast" community, because people are usually only really good executors in 1-3 domains. But I personally think it would be awesome, and would love to go to those meetups.
That’s just the real engineers (ie not software engineers)
Flawless logic. Cannot be refuted.
Wrote about many similar themes here :)
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/against-rationalism-for-meta-rationality
"Against Rationalism, For Meta-Rationality, Evidence, and Experience, Part 1
Foundations, and, why is Eliezer Yudkovsky fat and the Zizians nutty?"
And I have a Math PhD so I don't worry , your understanding is on solid ground :P
A couple of additional points:
1) For people supposed to be well versed in Economics, to be devoted to utilitarianism doesn't make sense. Behavioral Economics (Kahneman and others) showed that humans don't have closed form utility functions, and so summing utilities isn't well defined. But there is a whole field of Welfare Economics which describes more sensible and well behaved quantification of well being when considering the outcomes of policies.
2) And for people who seem to like Nietzsche, they should know this quote illustrating your (our) point about the limitations of not having real world experience:
"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy"
Thank you, looks like a well written write up, I will take a look :) — also cute dog
I agree with a lot of these critiques, but on-balance I still like rationalism a lot. It's not like they'll excommunicate you for working out and dating people, or for not using jargon, or for ceding certain things as unquantifiable. That still leaves all the other aspects of rationalism that I like. This is a good article, but it's not a strong case for not being a rationalist, in my view.
I'd see it as a spectrum--you can read the big people and go to meetups but you don't have to believe everything they say. Yes on updating your priors, no on shrimp welfare.
And I don't think they're actually *against* exercise, they just don't bother.
Yeah this article was more directed against rationalISTS than rationalISM. But is it ever really possible to separate the people from the ideology?
I think you can blame the ideology for undesirable behaviours if the behaviors are defensible within the ideological framework.
But I don't think that's the case here. "Use jargon" and "don't work out" and "reinvent known concepts" and "quantify the unquantifiable" are not principles of rationalism. They're just flaws that the personality types drawn to it are more likely to exhibit.
The best thing about this post is that it might prompt Scott to write a rebuttal.
I love this post but I have a minor quibble with this near the end:
"Tyler Cowen helped start a new branch of studies called “progress studies” – which is supposedly meant to gain an appreciation of how society changes over time. Now if that sounds familiar to you, that's because it’s that’s the entire fucking point of history."
The problem is that academic history has stopped studying progress and prefers to study the evils of colonialism and whether William Shakespeare was a gay black woman. If you are in or close to academia then the historians you interact with are not doing progress studies. If, by some mischance, they do study something that was progress they find a way to report on the negatives and ignore the fact that it raised wages, improved health etc. For example when Britain started the industrial revolution peasants voluntarily moved to work in factories because it was a better life than semi-subsistence agriculture being generally indoors and having food and drink readily available, but a historian will concentrate on the relatively rare enclosures and the poor living conditions in the factory towns without noticing that the rural peasant living conditions were generally worse...
So yeah having progress studies separate from history makes sense give the decline of the study of history in history departments
Important point.
I fear that commenters won’t separate rationalists from rationalism.
We can easily dunk on individuals or trends in any community, but isn’t Substack more about finding new ideas you like?
Maybe it's just because of the overlaps with Tech Bros and Finance guys, or selection effects because of my own fitness, but most of the Rationalist folk I know are notably more fit than most?
Sure, the headline guys like Scott and Zvi aren't, but they're probably below median weight for Americans, and the GMU guys are def below median overweight / obese for Americans. Eliezer is about average for an American.
Like there's a certain high income systematizing type of guy that overlaps with Rats who is That Guy at the gym who knows about macros and mesocycles and reads Renaissance Periodization stuff or does serious swimming / running / biking.
This was a very convincing deconstruction of the rationalist mindset.
"When all you have is a very high IQ brain, everything looks like a complex problem."
To be frank I think neologisms are part of fostering a sense of community, and are essential to developing an identity (in-group signaling), it's just that they tend to references more complex things than what you find in your average online community.
>When you're smart enough, you get really good at rationalizing things.
Spot on.
Rationalists wildly misunderstand rationality. They seem to think that it is a principle when it is actually a tool.
> I always found it strange that there was such an adjacency between the rationalist community and economics bloggers, especially the dorks from George Mason University. But it starts to make sense when you realize how heavily concentrated they are in certain parts of the country, and in certain industries.
You've got the causality backwards. The rationalist community initially coalesced around Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson's group blog. It's adjacent to the GMU blogosphere because it literally emerged from it.
This helps update my priors about the rationalists, thanks