[PragmaticPulp]

The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him, work through his reasoning, and update his blog with a note about it, but that didn't satisfy the author:

> Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes

> One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often.

This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone.

Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles.

This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.

[heavyset_go]

> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles.

Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias

[dekhn]

I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others).

once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid.

Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.

[kjeetgill]

I think I went down a somewhat similar route. It's easy to find oneself trying to embody some archetypal champion of "logical" and "rational" thinking when you're a highschool nerd.

In the end I think my issue that led me off it was that it just ended up being a) judgmental and b) like you, finding that I was just not right enough to justify it!

When I ran into more of those types (our types?) Who are a dime a dozen in a college engineering department my goto quip was:

The scientific method is the admission that rationality and logic are limited; they're just the first step — forming a hypothesis. The rest of it is about how your rationality and logic failed you.

I think this is partially why you find many rationalist and skeptic types not actually doing any science. They haven't had the humility beat into them by science yet, haha.

[323]

Another thing which helps is to not just automatically have an opinion on everything, even if somewhat informed.

It's ok to say "I don't know, this is very complex, even if I spent many hours reading about this matter". Too many rationalists just go with the option which seems a bit more plausible and then behave as if they have near certainty.

[kaba0]

So much this! But there is way too much emphasis on opinions, when frankly, unless someone is deeply invested in the given topic, it is likely worthless. And unfortunately, the less knowledgeable someone is, the more likely he/she has a very strong and vocal opinion on the topic.

[heavyset_go]

I was once attracted to it, and to EA, because of the surface-level values. It seemed like a community that wanted to acknowledge their own biases and work past them, yet in practice, it is a community that uses intellectualism as an aesthetic to confirm their preconceived biases. In its malignant form, you have LW and adjacent communities engaging in scientific racism revival. In the less malignant form, you have people working backwards and pretending that the conclusions they came to were "objective" because of the flowery Bayesian language they dressed their thought experiments in, as if they're constantly doing complex Bayesian inference in their heads. In the end, what was striking, to me, was the lack of humility you'd expect from those who agreed with the LW premise.

Similarly with EA, I liked the idea of optimizing charity for the most good, but in practice, the community seems to have no problem dedicating a ton of money, time and effort to MIRI and adjacent groups and people, because they've managed to use their intellectual aesthetics to spook themselves into believing that science fiction is reality. As a result, very real problems people experience today are discounted in favor of whatever scary future AI meme is spooking the community this month.

It's really kind of funny when you think about it, it's just a shame that they suck up so much oxygen in the room.

[astrange]

> Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other.

Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.

[astrange]

There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...

[the_only_law]

> I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin.

We’re all sinners.

[HideousKojima]

>debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled.

Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.

[the_only_law]

> The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness

I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.

[323]

You know those jokes about "how do you know someone is a vegan/PhD"?

Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism.

...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.