[matthewdgreen]

I’ve asked a number of people I know who are not “tech adjacent” (meaning that they don’t frequent boards like HN or tech Twitter, and they don’t live in the Bay Area) if they’ve ever heard of the Internet-based phenomenon that calls itself “rationalism”, and I have yet to find one who has heard of it. So I am skeptical about your claim regarding the causal arrow: I only know of this phenomenon because I’m in tech, and other tech people pointed me to it.

To me, this feels a little like saying “lots of tech people I know with high salaries were early contributors to Wikipedia, therefore being an early contributor to Wikipedia probably made them successful.”

[screye]

I had become a rationalist(ish) at least a decade before I knew what rationalism was as a movement. I very similarly has lost my faith in religion, far before I ever knew what atheism as a movement was too.

It can be considered causal. In that, many people follow the thought processes that underlie rationalism which direct them towards careers and outcomes of the sort that the person above was mentioning. (95+ percentile salary as a stable independent contributor in a field that values logic and structured thought). They may do it while being completely ignorant of the movement, but still being a rationalist for all intents and purposes.

[matthewdgreen]

> They may do it while being completely ignorant of the movement, but still being a rationalist for all intents and purposes.

If you consider “rationalism” (in the sense of the subject of this thread) to be equivalent to “following a scientific or rational thought process”, then the main question asked in the article becomes nonsensical. “Where are all the successful people who followed rational thought processes?” is a genuinely foolish question, because you can find countless notable examples with no effort at all.

But of course that’s not what the post was asking, and it’s why the poster has a harder time answering the question. The post refers to the very specific Internet phenomenon of “rationalism” which, while cleverly incorporating the notion of rational thought into its name, actually refers to a specific group of people who follow a specific set of teachings.

And those people are massively concentrated in US tech and tech-adjacent areas, largely because that’s where this specific set of beliefs took off first. That’s the causal arrow here.