[perching_aix]

I struggle to suspend disbelief that this is not just some ill-faith mockery.

The guy really quite explicitly spells out a journey of growing in intellectual humility. The writing is very, very blatantly in the genre of self-growth, which is why you see this structure so often. That he wanted to gravitate towards those whom he found smart (implying he did not consider himself that smart at the start, very directly contradicting what you say), participated, eventually discovered that there's smoke to the fire, then stopped participating, learning lessons along the way and now passing them on to the dear reader that much wiser.

How you walked away from this with the conclusions you did genuinely escapes me, and apparently this is not even your first time either then. Never stopped to reconsider? Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you? Do you maybe instinctively read it as a comparison, as if it was meant to suggest that other people (i.e. you) thus somehow do not appreciate reason? I have a meme for you if so: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...

Or are you at one of these stages yourself, and we can expect a blogpost from you in the future too?

[Planktonne]

> Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you?

I'm going to respond to just this bit of your comment, if you don't mind, because I think this is the core of both your and the author's misconception, with everything else flowing from that.

The author didn't, and still doesn't 'appreciate reason'.

They joined a cult of superiority and in-fighting that labelled itself as appreciating reason. Now they're out of the cult, but they think the issue is not with themselves, but with the others who did appreciating reason wrong. The fundamental flaw that they still haven't examined is that they still view themselves as a truth-seeker who was misled, not someone who made the wrong choices.

I've been wrong a lot, about many things, and there's always the easy temptation of reacting to that by treating it as just bad luck, believing that I did everything right but circumstances conspired against me. It's an easy option, but it's false, and it means you get stuck in the same pattern again.

Humility comes from recognising the ultimate, rather than proximal issue. Not 'I am still smart but the others were wrong and I got muddled' but 'maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was'. The article focuses on the movement as having the same flaws as everything else--it wasn't the superior home they were seeking--but doesn't consider the two most important elements required for growth here:

- Their own flaws and culpability

- The flaws inherent to the movement that aren't shared by society

The take away is 'the rationalist movement is no better than other groups, but I am' rather than 'both I and the rationalist movement have significant flaws that are not shared by everyone'.

[perching_aix]

OK. This is dedicated enough that I don't think you're just trying to be an ass anymore, you have to actually believe in this. Unfortunately, this also means I have no actual way of convincing you otherwise, because everything I say will be simply symmetric with your interpretation at every turn or rendered so.

Consider:

You posit that the author is simply offloading his culpability to this community. I'd argue this is in direct contradiction with the potshots he constantly takes at the various motifs pertinent to the ideology behind the community, rather than just the community or its members instead.

In no particular order, and without being exhaustive:

- he demonstrates an understanding that the "less wrong" positioning is asinine and boxes in the opposition to be "more wrong"

- he demonstrates an understanding of skepticism not necessarily being merited

- he demonstrates an understanding of post hoc justifications and motivated reasoning being common failure modes, falsely presenting as rigor

- he demonstrates an understanding that belonging to such a community is seriously cringe just in general, for the very obvious reasons

He encodes these understandings into jabs, and these jabs are present in nearly every paragraph, in the appropriate tenses, specifically to highlight (via repetition) just how hilariously off base his source motivation was from the get go. His experience with the exact community and its people are just a delivery vehicle for this. I implore you to ask yourself: if he genuinely doesn't give two hot shits about reasoning right, why are these swipes in there in such amounts?

But then I can already see your answer: well clearly it is to just performatively flex his superior thinking skills! Now, how would I possibly try and falsify that? There's no way for me to do so. I mean, just ask yourself: what would the guy needed to have written so that he doesn't come off like this to you, while still telling the ~same story? You seem to have already decided what kind of person he is, and figured out an entire lore around it. Speaking of...

Consider:

> The author didn't, and still doesn't 'appreciate reason'.

This is the most hideous, blatant example for mind reading that I've seen in a good while. But then I'm also just inferring from the same text! How do I know it any better that he is, in fact, just an innocent "truth-seeker"? Nohow.

And so I'm extrapolating from myself, because the core desire speaks to me. Believe it or not, I do also happen to know what it's like to be wrong, do recognize to have been wrong before about a lot of things, and have also misjudged ideals and communities alike. I have even been in similar situations like this, where I was accused of being oh so conceited, despite actually having pretty serious issues with self confidence, and not grading my intellect particularly high at all (I still don't). But unlike you suggest, whether the issue primarily lied with me, the ideals, or the communities and their people, actually varied. Usually there was enough to go around for every part of the equation, rather than somehow conveniently always everything being my fault, as much as the human psyche very much attempted to make it feel like.

It is in this context that I'm reading this relentlessly condescending characterization. Where I know for a fact that yes, I absolutely might have fallen for this were I there at the right time and place; that yes, a lot of it is very stupid very blatantly; and that yes, the core spirit behind it can come off badly. I just also know that it is not the intention, because I lived the intention, assert otherwise as you might. Not the least because again, I certainly don't think that caring for getting things right is a particularly outlandish interest among people, after all. And not the least because I'm convinced that what you're gauging as arrogance is really just an overly candid, dorky interest, in all its awkward [0] detail.

[0] The author even evokes this by going into embarrassingly explicit detail about his plans for rhetorical domination - to me those passages ooze sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, to you, I guess you just took them straight on, in horror. I have to say, the post must be very tonally all over the place in your reading.

[Planktonne]

There's a certain arrogance inherent in castigating someone for 'mind-reading' while also trying to supply several rounds of their imagined argument. Please consider that if you're having to scrape this much in the barrel for debatable evidence of his humility, it might be because it's not actually there.

[perching_aix]

I did. See the very next sentences there.

Maybe you are just messing with people after all? I can definitely appreciate how something like that might come across as arrogant, when you just skip over or devalue the sentences that directly make it not so:

> But then I'm also just inferring from the same text! How do I know it any better that he is, in fact, just an innocent "truth-seeker"? Nohow.

Like this was not sarcasm. I was directly addressing the exact thing you're taking issue with, acknowledging the limitation. This is the way people communicate humility. They explicitly acknowledge that they're aware they're not the be all end all.

The passages that followed were then justifications on why I hold this belief then despite this limitation.

> Please consider that if you're having to scrape this much in the barrel

I think I hammered this in pretty well, but all the points I raised in the way of "supporting OP'd humility" consist of features that are either very heavily repeated, structural, or I find otherwise extremely blatant. So what you characterize as "scraping the barrel" is at best more a scraping of my own skin, in frustration, for how hyper persistently are you trying to contradict the obvious and extensively evidenced.

Suffice to say, please consider the exact opposite? I've been considering your view plenty. Even you suggest that the post's flow makes no good sense: so either the author is just some exceptional, miraculous buffoon like you claim they are, following in the footsteps of other wondrous specimens... or you're grossly misinterpreting the whole thing, have been repeatedly doing so with other people, and have been making some real tonedeaf remarks so far, confidently falling for the exact traps you're beating the drum to be so resistant against. I really don't think the former is likelier than the latter, and according to your logic, you shouldn't either.

This would have been kind of the exercise from the get-go. To get you to try and spend like a grand total of 5 minutes re-reading the thing under the - to you, clearly - oh so unthinkable, blasphemous assumption, that maybe you're the one who's wrong? Just genuinely assuming, for the sake of the argument, that maybe OP isn't actually the evil incarnate you think they are, much like how similarly cartoonish ideas are rarely if ever true in general (or how assuming ill-faith is typically the wrong call). And just like how I keep desperately getting this point across, entertaining a similar off chance idea, that maybe you're not being like this just to troll.

[perching_aix]

Rather than the pleading and subjectivity, because I cannot edit my previous reply by now, let me separately try the approach you attempted, and articulate what I think is the salient difference you're missing, and where the misunderstanding comes from.

Let's define arrogance as someone "not being able to imagine an alternative due to hubris". I think that's a fair definition, at least in-context.

The core of my point then is that the exhibited part of that, "not being able to imagine an alternative", can actually happen in at least two different ways:

- one cannot imagine an alternative because they're so taken by their own capabilities and track record, or because that'd make them wrong and thus inferior (hubris) -- what you're supposing

- one genuinely, honest to god, just plain cannot imagine an alternative, and are simply candidly reporting that impression, encoding it directly, intensity-matched, in their language use

I think the author is actually a lot simpler soul than you take him as. And so what I'm positing then, is that I think you're conflating these two as a result of all this, especially because they present the ~same. And that further, this may not be a distinction you've ever considered, because if you did, the blogpost would have read blatantly different, and you wouldn't report running into this "strange" type of writing so often.

This is not to say the author would be immune to hubris either, or that it's one or the other, but rather that the signal you've been picking up on may not actually be as diagnostic in the way of that as you think it is.

They started out with some amount of hubris, let it grew dominant, realized it grew dominant, decided that's not what they want(ed) to be and that they've been deluding themselves. If they did not care about reasoning correctness, that recognition process and conclusion I'm not sure would have facilitated, certainly not this way. If this was about hubris like you framed it as, they wouldn't have stopped and made an exit. They'd have just dug their heel in further and kept enjoying the ride.