| > Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of rationality and EA that gets presented online with only the highlights, but there’s a lot more out there in the fringes that is really weird. For example, many know about Roko’s Basilisk as a thought exercise and much has been written about it, but fewer know that Roko has been writing misogynistic rants on Twitter and claiming things like having women in the workforce is “very negative” for GDP. The Slate Star Codex subreddit was a home for rationalists on Reddit, but they had so many problems with culture war topics that they banned discussion of them. The users forked off and created “The Motte” which is a bit of a cesspool dressed up with rationalist prose. Even the SlateStarCodex subreddit has become so toxic that I had to unsubscribe. Many of the posts and comments on women or dating were becoming indistinguishable from incel communities other than the rationalist prose style. Even the real-world rationalist and EA communities aren’t immune, with several high profile sexual misconduct scandals making the news in recent years. It’s a weird space. It felt like a fun internet philosophy community when my coworkers introduced it years ago, but the longer I’ve observed it the more I’ve realized it attracts and accepts a lot of people whose goals aren’t aligned with objectively “make the world better” as long as they can write their prose in the rationalist style. It’s been strange to observe. Of course, at every turn people will argue that the bad actors are not true rationalists, but I’ve seen enough from these communities to know that they don’t really discriminate much until issues boil over into the news. |
>In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."
The problem then, as of now, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. Rationalist spaces like /r/SSC, The Motte, et. al are just modern sophistry labs that like to think they're filled with the next Socrates when they're actually filled with endless Thrasymachi. Scott Alexander and Eleizer Yudkowsky have something meaningful (and deradicalizing) to say. Their third-degree followers? Not so much.