[red_admiral]

They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.

Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.

[creatonez]

You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.

[emsign]

They WANT to think in absolutes which is a red flag in a person.

[Enginerrrd]

That's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?

[danny_codes]

Maybe rationalists aren’t homogeneous? Unfortunately there are a rather concerning amount of news articles detailing cases where some subset of the rationalist community has gone off the deep end.

[wizzwizz4]

They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.

[gzread]

It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them, because the expected value of listening to them is negative.

[wizzwizz4]

It means I shouldn't listen to them in general. The LessWrongers are mainly wrong about things they think they understand: when they aren't overconfident, their improvisational skills tend to be decent. They were an excellent source of information about COVID-19, but they're a terrible source of information in the areas where they think they have expertise.

When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it might be very useful, and it's pretty easy to tell: you just check whether it looks like they're doing science, or Rationalism™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.

[johnfn]

Rationalists were talking about AI decades before anyone else were talking about it. They were also early on COVID and crypto. They are only "aggressively wrong" about "everything" if you are, ironically, not thinking rationally about it.

[SpaceManNabs]

I lost most of my respect for g...n when i noticed he he was one of those IQ guys

[blell]

What does that mean? People who believe in IQ?

[zone411]

Rationalists were right about everything that mattered: crypto, AI, COVID... HN commentators, by contrast, were wrong about everything that mattered.

[unmole]

> most of them are eugenicists.

[citation needed]

[creatonez]

Covered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...

[ModernMech]

The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.

[DonHopkins]

Why make better predictions, when you can make better excuses, and be wrong in much more sophisticated ways?

[uoaei]

I may use different definitions than you, but I put it as "they conflate rationality and reason".

[lo_zamoyski]

It really is a sad, provincial spectacle. Reminds me of the embarrassing "movement" where people called themselves "Brights". I expect we'll soon have a new movement called "The Smart People".

A weird synthesis of the goofy, the immature, the delusional, and the grandiose shot through with mental illness.

[everdrive]

>once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.

It's important to remember that for a brief time, people argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad thing.

[SpicyLemonZest]

They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.

[thesquandered]

Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.