[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.