[zahlman]

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it.

Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning.

The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.

[pdonis]

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true

And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.

[s1artibartfast]

Im not sure what your criticism is directed at.

In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.

We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.

Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.

[pdonis]

> We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.

We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of causal mechanisms. But we can't prove by logical argument based on "fundamental axioms of reasoning" that these things are "true".

[s1artibartfast]

I see. I agree that there are major limitations to purely logical arguments.

This is why unlike the rationists of the 17th century, modern "rationalists" predominately focus on empiricism (ironic i know). They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. This has the knock on effect of interest in prediction markets.

Is your impression otherwise?

[pdonis]

> They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth.

Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in replacement for your brain. "Rationalists" often seem to talk as though they think it is--just follow this recipe and your thinking will automatically give the right answer. And anyone who tries to talk about limitations of this is obviously a crackpot.

> Is your impression otherwise?

Not with respect to obsession with Bayesian reasoning, no. But I seem to have a different take on that than you do. See above.

[s1artibartfast]

Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". What does that look like for the real world?

[tcfhgj]

Trying to ignore reality doesn't sound rational.

[jml7c5]

>This is a label applied from outside

I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".

There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.

[zahlman]

> I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.

Yudkowsky wrote them from 2006-2009, so he would have been in his late 20s.

> because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate

The Sequences are about pure reasoning, not about results from "studies". They are very much about how to analyze studies and about the fact that you should care whether they replicate.

In fact, I can't even recall any such "studies referenced".

[perching_aix]

We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context. It is not just "facts and logic", and it is most certainly not universal, since universal optimality doesn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith

Taken at face value, that'd mean bridging the analog hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole), which is fundamentally impossible. Logic proves consistency, not truth, despite the many related terminologies suggesting otherwise. This is further skipping over how people segment the world different, even relative to themselves over time, which thus forms a coordination problem.

It reminds me to how HTTP is stateless. Yeah, it's stateless - all the state keeping has simply been laundered a layer above. It may sound tantalizing to position certain arguments as simply rational (i.e. correct/optimal), but all that ultimately does is sidestep the actual coordination part, which never really went away. There is still an underlying segmentation model being asserted, it is just now coated in self-righteousness, an illusion of rigor, drawing up a false dichotomy of "either you segment the world like we do, and then you're correct, or you're incorrect, and your segmentation is too".

See this rhetorical landmine in action in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986530

Even if I go out of my way and interpret the word such that it merely means "acting on reason" (as opposed to some sort of nonreason), that doesn't mean much for the same reasons. You can have any arbitrary reason to act or think any particular way; possessing an explainable rationale on its own, even if internally coherent, is not necessarily one way or another.

[zahlman]

> We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context.

No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.

Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.

[perching_aix]

The parent comment has been talking about exactly people who have been turning this into an identity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

If this doesn't apply to you, great, but then we're talking past each other.

[zahlman]

And my point is that according to the works that supposedly motivate them, they are explicitly not supposed to do that; furthermore, I'm not actually convinced that they are doing it on anything like the scale that critics allege.

(And no, forming a "community" does not make for an identity. I don't think of myself as a "HN user" and I would certainly never introduce myself that way offline. Similarly for Stack Overflow back when it was relevant, or anything else.)

[perching_aix]

I'd argue it's hard to have a community without something in common, so identity formation is kind of unavoidable (as there is an identifier), even if people resist it.

In some cases, that point of commonality is just the venue (like your HN example). Not the case for this.

That said, I do appreciate the distinction and you may very well be right. Like certainly, one can appreciate logical thinking and quality argumentation without adopting any kind of group identity.

[lyu07282]

You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".

[zahlman]

> You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right?

If you say so.

That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).

[lyu07282]

There is nothing I could possibly say to convince you otherwise, in the same EXACT way I couldn't convince a scientologist that their thetan levels are nonsense. It was never the argument that conditional probability or other mathematics is wrong, nobody is ever arguing that, but that is all you disciples ever argue against. You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people believing to "reason" yourselves to some higher "truth" on all kinds of broad topics using some WILDLY misappropriated and misunderstood mathematical principles.

[eudamoniac]

I don't know who the Rationalists are, but if I imagine them as some kind of misguided Vulcan logicians, I cannot understand what argument you and others are trying to make here. Do you have any concrete examples of a rationalist believing nonsense dogmatically?

[zahlman]

> There is nothing I could possibly say to convince you otherwise, in the same EXACT way I couldn't convince a scientologist that their thetan levels are nonsense.

What on Earth are you talking about?

What is the supposed nonsense that I am supposedly convinced about?

> but that is all you disciples ever argue against.

Who is a "disciple"? First off, it's perfectly possible to defend members of groups that one doesn't identify with. But also I don't think the group is a natural category to begin with. I think it is outsiders that are thinking of them as a group to critique them.

> You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people

What education do you suppose is lacking here, and what is your evidence for it being lacking? Who are you to draw conclusions about the degrees of random groups of people?

> believing to "reason" yourselves to some higher "truth"

Can you show an example of the fallacious reasoning you've observed, and explain how it connects to anything that people like Yudkowsky or Alexander ever said?

> using some WILDLY misappropriated and misunderstood mathematical principles.

Can you show an example of such misappropriation or misunderstanding?

[bigbadfeline]

> That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).

It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. That's so typical, if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms", they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. Dishonesty is the defining feature of that "movement"

[zahlman]

> It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere.

It's not a strawman. It's a central example of what I had in mind when I used the word "axiom".

> if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms"

They don't refer to wild conjectures as axioms.

> they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such.

There is no "blame" going on here. Someone said I sounded like a cult member (which incidentally is insulting and inappropriate on HN; but I thought I would try to steer the discussion back on course) and I correctly explained why that perception is irrelevant. When I said

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false.

That is, in fact, inarguably true. Bayes' Law is an example of that exact sort of thing. If you don't believe that conditional probabilities can be worked out that way, that won't change the fact that conditional probabilities can in fact be worked out that way; and it won't change the fact that in the long run I will be able to exploit your fallacy in games of chance.

The other poster gave no example of supposedly false or unsound axioms, so I cannot be strawmanning by failing to respond to them. My assertion is that such false or unsound axioms are not, in fact, in play. The burden of proof lies with those claiming their existence.

[stackghost]

Go back and reread yourself in this thread.

1. Someone says they don't like rationalism

2. You say there's no such thing

3. Someone else suggests your defense of rationalism is materially similar to how scientologists defend their cult

4. You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???

That's such a weird non-sequitur. Nothing before had anything to do with Bayes. That is just a straw man you constructed to argue with.

[zahlman]

> Go back and reread yourself in this thread.

I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long.

> You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???

No, that isn't at all what I said.

First off, it makes no sense for the other party to characterize my "defense of rationalism" in any manner, because I was not offering such a thing. When I say that something doesn't exist, that isn't defending the thing. The thing cannot be "defended" if it doesn't exist in the first place!

Second, I very clearly did not deny any "material similarity". I said that any such material similarity does not matter.

Third, the truth of Bayes' theorem is not why I am correct, and that's also clearly not what I asserted. Rather, Bayes' theorem is an example of what I am correct about.

There is no non-sequitur there; you misrepresent the argument completely. I did not construct a strawman; I merely gave an example of what "rational beliefs" (which are, again, not articles of faith) entail. The point is that, by the same reasoning, you could equally well make out the hard sciences in general to be "cults". If you think you can look at a title for a work like "The Sequences" and instantly map that to "ooh, scary religious canon!", why does the same not apply to, say, Euclid's Elements?

The only strawmanning here is on your part.

I have no idea what strange or harmful articles of faith other people ITT seem to have in mind. Someone mentioned Roko's Basilisk, and as far as I can tell this is the closest the thread got; but that frankly doesn't qualify, either. It's just a proposed consequence of a particular decision theory, and most of the people who care about that decision theory seem to think it's fallacious. (Whether they can propose a fallacy within that theory, or think that this is a proof-by-contradiction refutation of the theory, I don't really know. Personally I think the latter is far more likely.) If it were actually an article of faith, you would see the equivalent of street preachers using it to solicit donations to MIRI. As far as I've been shown, that doesn't actually happen.

But since I haven't been given any better examples than that, I can't argue against them. No, "the Zizians exist(ed)" doesn't count here, first off because nobody's identified any articles of faith they held; second because nobody's drawn any connection between those and any actual principles of rationality.

[nradov]

You're really missing the point. Only moronic cult members believe that the real world can be reduced to conditional probabilities, or that the probabilities of anything important can be calculated to a useful level of precision.