| > I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials. Engaging with someone's ideas isn't the same thing as throwing yourself behind that person. There are a number of public writers associated with rationalism (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander probably being the most famous), but the social scene isn't defined by following them as leaders or thinking their ideas are correct. > My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down. The skeptics didn't think the paranormal was an easy target they were punching down at, they thought it was a corrosive, poltically-powerful, and immoral force in US poltics that was leading towards bad ends. Also what you call the paranormal they call "institutional Christianity in US poltics" - even that choice of words has poltical valence. > There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those. I think this is you personally simply having a somewhat different set of poltical concerns than the skeptics did (in part because time has passed since their heyday, and the landscape of American poltics has shifted some), and wanting them to care about exactly what you are about and not about what they cared about, without wanting to claim that their object-level concerns were necessarily wrong. |