The article hits it pretty well, but my own personal experience has been that groups or individuals that believe they have some inside line on the RightTM way to think have a bad habit of going...
The article hits it pretty well, but my own personal experience has been that groups or individuals that believe they have some inside line on the RightTM way to think have a bad habit of going weird. Not that there aren't exceptions, like the article points out. But speaking purely of personal experiences, that rationalists I've run into, which were the higher functioning ones referenced in the article, were also rather unpleasant conversationalists and tended toward the odd.
Rationalists tend to believe that being open-minded about weird ideas and willing to discuss them seriously is a strength. Weird ideas might be wrong, but they might just be overlooked by the...
Rationalists tend to believe that being open-minded about weird ideas and willing to discuss them seriously is a strength. Weird ideas might be wrong, but they might just be overlooked by the mainstream.
You’re also supposed to test new ideas, scientifically if that’s feasible, but it’s often difficult to do in practice.
It’s fairly rare that being willing to go beyond mainstream consensus pays off. I think the beginning of the pandemic was a good example of that, though. You needed a certain willingness to look weird to start stocking up on supplies and wearing masks before everyone started doing it. (Some authorities even put out word not to buy masks because medical staff needed them and they weren’t shown to be effective for regular people.)
For another example of a weird idea around that time, apparently there was a study that the COVID-19 virus didn’t survive as well on metal surfaces, so some rationalists started wrapping doorknobs with copper. I don’t think there’s any evidence that this worked, but the attitude was, it might help, and we shouldn’t be afraid to try it just because it looks weird.
There are downsides to this attitude, like when people get too attached to rather speculative ideas. Especially for people who aren’t great at critical thinking, rejecting anything that sounds too weird is usually a good heuristic.
Compare with the heuristic that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s usually a good way to avoid financial scams, but it will occasionally miss a good bet.
I remember reading some rationalist posts doing some soul-searching after the cryptocurrency boom along the lines of “hey, we’re supposed to be open-minded about weird ideas, so why didn’t we get in early on this?” (I mean, I think a few people did get in early, but it mostly wasn’t taken seriously.)
Right, being open minded isn't a bad thing. But an idea is a dangerous thing if it's the only one you have and you construct argument after argument to circle back to that idea. But I do think...
Right, being open minded isn't a bad thing. But an idea is a dangerous thing if it's the only one you have and you construct argument after argument to circle back to that idea.
But I do think it's worth differentiating ideas and forcing thought patterns. Like the article mentioned with the zizians, much of their violence and oddness stemmed from forcing their decision making through a specific philosophy.
So it's less that rationalists entertain ideas outside the mainstream (which they do), and more that they sometimes try and force the complexity of the world into a single, sometimes inflexible, way of thinking. Which creates seemingly strange jumps in logic to people who don't subscribe to their views. And sometimes those jumps and their desire to rationalize them are alarming.
I think this is pretty spot on. I've read a bunch of stuff by them and I think I sort of understand their way of thinking: turn off all the heuristics in your brain and start going around trying...
I think this is pretty spot on. I've read a bunch of stuff by them and I think I sort of understand their way of thinking: turn off all the heuristics in your brain and start going around trying to do stuff from first principles.
It's a very brittle, overly nimble way of thinking. If you start doing random experiments and believing the results at p<0.05, you only need to do about 20 of them before you've adopted a false belief. And if you've turned off all your heuristics (nobody else is doing that, that would upset people, that would look weird, I've never heard of that happening, that's gross, etc.) you end up willing to take quite radical action based on things you think are probably true.
This can make rationalists dangerous to be around, because they'll turn on you immediately if they think the math says they should, and they've turned off their defenses against people manipulating the math. With enough of them about, you can get people assassinated by credibly promising to hand out enough bed nets in the event of their death, because they don't always take their analysis out to higher-order effects.
A good treatment of rationalism takes it all the way out to things like credible commitments to being a community member who is valuable to others and safe to be around. And I hear rumors that if you do rationalism well enough you get back around to something called "virtue ethics". But at that point it kind of starts to lose its distinctive "charm".
I do now, because we have the space, but I didn’t used to. We could probably stretch our pantry a couple months if we had to. I used to have like maybe a day or two worth of food cause I didn’t...
I do now, because we have the space, but I didn’t used to. We could probably stretch our pantry a couple months if we had to.
I used to have like maybe a day or two worth of food cause I didn’t really know how to cook and I was living with 5 room mates in a 3 br and none of them knew how to cook either.
Id keep spaghetti, oatmeal, granola bars, maybe a frozen meal or two and thats it. Whenever I did want to actually cook I had to go to the store to get perishables. I feel like most people are like this.
Theres so many people who don’t keep any food at all in their living space. I saw posts of people who got covid, lived alone, didn’t have access to food delivery so they’d just starve for a couple days while they were sick.
I get the no-space argument, but I think it's completely wrong. People seem to envision keeping a giant stockpile of all their usual foods, meticulously organized. You don't need that. A 25 lb bag...
I get the no-space argument, but I think it's completely wrong. People seem to envision keeping a giant stockpile of all their usual foods, meticulously organized. You don't need that.
A 25 lb bag of rice, a big bottle of multivitamins, and a bowl to cook the rice in. It can fit under a chair, and it will provide almost all of the calories and a bare minimum of nutrients 1 person needs for a month. It'll be boring, but sure as shit beats starving.
You might want a sealed container to keep pests out of the rice. There are plastic dogfood containers that work well. Buying potatoes in bulk might work for some people, depending on what you...
You might want a sealed container to keep pests out of the rice. There are plastic dogfood containers that work well.
Buying potatoes in bulk might work for some people, depending on what you normally eat.
My understanding via the wild bird food store is that rats can and will chew through plastic containers, you have to put the food in a metal container with a tight fitting lid if you want to...
My understanding via the wild bird food store is that rats can and will chew through plastic containers, you have to put the food in a metal container with a tight fitting lid if you want to protect against them. I ended up doing this with the alfalfa meal I use as fertilizer because I wasn’t willing to risk rats in my garage. Apparently alfalfa is basically chocolate to rats.
I bring this up because I’m imagining someone breaking into that stockpile in desperation and finding nothing but a hole in the side and rat poop.
Yeah, outside storage, or where that's can get to would be tough. I keep bird seed in metal canisters outside. For indoor pantries though, the food safe five gallon buckets and gamma seal lids...
Yeah, outside storage, or where that's can get to would be tough. I keep bird seed in metal canisters outside. For indoor pantries though, the food safe five gallon buckets and gamma seal lids should be fine unless you've got a real rat problem, and is pretty much the same way restaurants store large amounts of food.
But I've never really needed to deter rats, so people who do should be careful.
Yeah I think for me it was really just that I was young and didn’t know how to cook or prep or anything. I might have kept a huge bag of rice around if I even knew those existed and also knew how...
Yeah I think for me it was really just that I was young and didn’t know how to cook or prep or anything. I might have kept a huge bag of rice around if I even knew those existed and also knew how to cook rice.
We keep two of those in the pantry now, I think they last about five years before they start tasting gritty.
Copper is used as a passive antimicrobial surface in hospitals for some time now. It is not a "weird idea", it's actually been around centuries. In fact, other specific metals have been identified...
For another example of a weird idea around that time, apparently there was a study that the COVID-19 virus didn’t survive as well on metal surfaces, so some rationalists started wrapping doorknobs with copper. I don’t think there’s any evidence that this worked, but the attitude was, it might help, and we shouldn’t be afraid to try it just because it looks weird.
Copper is used as a passive antimicrobial surface in hospitals for some time now. It is not a "weird idea", it's actually been around centuries. In fact, other specific metals have been identified as antimicrobial and have had medical use for some time as well - silver, gold, titanium and zinc all have various antimicrobial properties.
Modern research on these metals includes the attempt to use them in nanoclusters inside the body (or topically at the site of the wound) to help control infections and spread, and combinations of the materials with electrostatic materials have been explored to increase their effectiveness.
Good to know! Sure, it made sense. But I meant "weird" in the social sense of looking weird, socially. If you went to someone's house and found that they had wrapped all their doorknobs with...
Good to know! Sure, it made sense.
But I meant "weird" in the social sense of looking weird, socially. If you went to someone's house and found that they had wrapped all their doorknobs with copper strips, that would probably seem pretty weird?
Other examples at around that time: we met with a contractor who (cheerfully) didn't want to shake hands and suggested an alternative.That seemed eccentric and my wife even wondered if it was somehow racist (a common notion at the time), but in retrospect he was just ahead of the curve and good for him.
I remember suggesting that my wife wear a mask grocery shopping and getting some resistance.
Later, of course, it became common and then required, but there was still that brief time period when society was a bit slow to react and people who were early had to push past some social resistance.
Often what I've observed at least from encountering some rationalist writers/content at a distance, is that they really don't deserve to have co-opted the term "rational"/"rationalist" because...
Often what I've observed at least from encountering some rationalist writers/content at a distance, is that they really don't deserve to have co-opted the term "rational"/"rationalist" because they have polluted the term.
What I often see, rather than a focus on just rationality/reason alone, is a tendency to coldly quantify and over-analyze everything in a way that they think is removing bias, but often is at the expense of considering other facets of things, often human aspects, and really is just crafting its own narrow lens, but marketing it as "rational"
In some ways I think this has led to a lot of "making things look scientific" (not sure if there's a word for this), but basically because you have all this data, and graphs, and logic about something, it gives it an "air" of scientific rigor, regardless of if that's true or whether X, Y, or Z should even be looked at only from that angle.
It reminds me of people so deeply ingrained in a particular way of thinking (engineering or otherwise) that they start applying that model to everything, even mundane or social things in their own life where even social situations are just another technical problem to be solved
It is no surprise that some of the worst figures of the tech world / Silicon Valley have embraced the movement- it lends itself to technocratic ideas. Even rationalists' focus on AI safety seems mostly to be from the "existential" / "sci-fi AI takeover" angle that actually pushes the industry's own rhetoric about how "intelligent" the systems actually are, rather than any of its immediate, already-felt harms. It's all about the potential of a singularity / super-intelligence, rather than the social impacts already happening.
Rationalists were AI doomers long before the current AI boom got started. I think a better way to put it is that a lot of the AI doomer stuff came from them and the industry has co-opted it....
Rationalists were AI doomers long before the current AI boom got started. I think a better way to put it is that a lot of the AI doomer stuff came from them and the industry has co-opted it. (OpenAI was originally founded by people worried about AI, hence the weird non-profit structure, and look how that turned out.)
see also: rationalwiki, which is completely unrelated to the rationalists and has a completely different set of issues that is at least as large. It seems to keep happening with people who choose...
in a way that they think is removing bias, but often is at the expense of considering other facets of things
see also: rationalwiki, which is completely unrelated to the rationalists and has a completely different set of issues that is at least as large. It seems to keep happening with people who choose the name.
even social situations are just another technical problem to be solved
I don't even think this approach has to necessarily lead to nonsensical outcomes. But you have to accept and understand less rational facets of human life like emotional needs and really think things through, and you need to have similarly non-psychopathic goals. I think the usually problem lies in either of those things.
edit: also, regarding focusing on AI doomerism instead of immediate problems, I actually think this is sensible to some degree. I see the rationale as "this is one of the most paradigm changing and at the same time fastest developing technologies in human history, it has a high potential to radically change our lives, and we tend to be really bad at long-term thinking in general, so something changing this fast may just be bad enough to be catastrophic unless somebody realizes the risks quickly enough". I don't know if I'm on their side regarding the conclusions from this, but I think this rationale is correct.
Beware that rationalists have haters who like to say nasty things about them on RationalWiki. It’s not unbiased. But yes, “rationalist” is a somewhat unfortunate name that stuck for describing...
Beware that rationalists have haters who like to say nasty things about them on RationalWiki. It’s not unbiased.
But yes, “rationalist” is a somewhat unfortunate name that stuck for describing this particular community.
Perhaps I worded it wrong, but I meant to say that RationalWiki, despite being unrealted to rationalists, is another community that claims to focus on rationality despite being quite biased and...
Perhaps I worded it wrong, but I meant to say that RationalWiki, despite being unrealted to rationalists, is another community that claims to focus on rationality despite being quite biased and not exactly rational. Perhaps the word itself is a potential red flag when used in this way.
I’m not sure it’s a meaningful distinction because most intellectualism is pseudo-intellectualism, including lots of famous names in history. Even people who do real work will often pontificate on...
I’m not sure it’s a meaningful distinction because most intellectualism is pseudo-intellectualism, including lots of famous names in history. Even people who do real work will often pontificate on subjects outside their expertise.
But a particular pattern I see in the rationalist community is what I call science as metaphor. For example, Bayesian probability is a big deal, so people use the word “prior” a lot and use p-values to describe their beliefs (“what’s your p(doom)”), but rarely do they ever do any statistical calculations.
Science as metaphor is hardly restricted to rationalists, though. Some common words we use now like “feedback” were originally technical terms that got co-opted via being used as metaphor.
Emphasis mine. I don't really have anything to add since I don't know much about rationalists. Don't think I've ever met one IRL or even online, as far as I know. But I did find that quote...
Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who knew both Zizians and participants in Leverage Research, put it bluntly. “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once they start thinking for themselves.”
Emphasis mine. I don't really have anything to add since I don't know much about rationalists. Don't think I've ever met one IRL or even online, as far as I know.
But I did find that quote interesting. Very much a double-edged sword. Especially since it's easy these days to do your own "research" online.
Honestly, I don't think Taylor's take on this is exclusive to rationalists. I think this is something that came up with the internet, and was later super-charged by social media's recommendation...
Honestly, I don't think Taylor's take on this is exclusive to rationalists. I think this is something that came up with the internet, and was later super-charged by social media's recommendation algorithms: it gave people the ability to build their own global echo chambers, because finding like-minded people has become so damn easy.
While this has also lead to a lot of good, the bad side of it is that people automatically become less trusting of institutions, because they spend so much time on their phones, getting pushed sometimes borderline propaganda which entrenches them further in their beliefs.
People are inherently lazy, like all animals. It is rare for us to seek out material that challenges us all the time. It is much easier for us to accept a new fact that fits in with our own mental model of the world. Recommendation algorithms coupled with the fact that our attention has been monetized means that there is a ton of money being made by people sliding down the extremist pipeline. There is simply a lot of people who are not smart enough to understand that the only reason they accept some fact given by a stranger on the internet is that they already agree with it.
Like with all things, governments were way too slow to react and education has lost multiple generations to this, and the problem is that public education is an institution, which is going to have a hard time reviving the idea of trusting in institutions among those who don't trust in them.
We have had quite vivid examples of untrustworthy and even malicious government action lately, so it’s not like this distrust is entirely wrong. Unfortunately, distrust in government seems to feed...
We have had quite vivid examples of untrustworthy and even malicious government action lately, so it’s not like this distrust is entirely wrong. Unfortunately, distrust in government seems to feed populism, which makes the government more untrustworthy.
The problem, as with everything, is that "not trusting the government" is is a very broad range, going all the way from "people shouldn't need driver's licenses to drive a car" type libertianism...
The problem, as with everything, is that "not trusting the government" is is a very broad range, going all the way from "people shouldn't need driver's licenses to drive a car" type libertianism towards "maybe we don't need 15 regulations and expensive certifications every 5 years for mundane screws".
At the risk of sounding like an elightened centrist:tm:, a lot of the sauce is finding the sensible out of all of these opinions and ideologies and slapping them together into something that works for you. Of course, centrists then also falls for the trap of extremists where they think that harmful opinions are okay as long as they're expressed nicely.
Many well-intentioned centrists rely on information and feelings which are most readily available to them. Moderation and compromise in terms of maintaining a status quo relies on unshifting...
Of course, centrists then also falls for the trap
Many well-intentioned centrists rely on information and feelings which are most readily available to them. Moderation and compromise in terms of maintaining a status quo relies on unshifting alternatives. As one party moves more to the right they bring the median option closer to the right. It's difficult to evaluate things fairly by comparing them to the visible alternatives when the visible alternatives are not honest takes and thus not a balanced representation of thought. This is essentially the median mechanism--including when choosing representative candidates when the diversity of thought is biased and leans a certain way.
If you are taking the time to listen to and adopt solutions from extremists, is that still centrism? When does centrism become something that looks more like rationalism than centrism? Is centrism logical consistency, evidence-based reasoning, and a systematic analysis of problems and solutions, regardless of whether those solutions fall on the left or right of the political spectrum? Well... that's the philosophical position of rationalism. I guess centrism focuses more on social stability at the expense of logical consistency, yes? The pursuit of middle-ground at the expense of evidence and reason.
The thing is that despite all of those valid criticisms of rationalists, my experience with them is that they tend to be smarter than at least 95% of the population including most of their...
The thing is that despite all of those valid criticisms of rationalists, my experience with them is that they tend to be smarter than at least 95% of the population including most of their critics. So if rationalists cannot escape this, what does that tell us about humanity in general.
The lesson, of course, is to be more humble, but that doesn't negate that the problem still exists.
“Above average for college grads” doesn’t seem implausible for well-known rationalist bloggers. (Since I’ve never met any in person, I couldn’t say more than that.)
“Above average for college grads” doesn’t seem implausible for well-known rationalist bloggers. (Since I’ve never met any in person, I couldn’t say more than that.)
I honestly don't think so at all, and I'm saying that in the context of living almost entirely in a university educated social bubble. But I admit that like skybrian I only know the ones that post...
I honestly don't think so at all, and I'm saying that in the context of living almost entirely in a university educated social bubble. But I admit that like skybrian I only know the ones that post online, especially on blogs but also forums. But those tend to be the most visible and therefore also criticized ones anyway.
What's double plus weird is that this "do your own research" trait often lines up very well with this trait: The loophole is that they're not trusting in the authority to make decisions, they're...
What's double plus weird is that this "do your own research" trait often lines up very well with this trait:
But they want some trustworthy authority to change the way they think until they become perfect, and then to assign them to their role in the grand plan to save humanity.
The loophole is that they're not trusting in the authority to make decisions, they're trusting the authority's toolset to free themselves to be able to make their own decisions. Accepting the assigned slot isn't giving in to authoritarianism, it's earning a justified reward for having done the work.
Classic self-selection problem, same as people always say about MENSA: it's not an unbiased sample of high-IQ people, it's a group of high-IQ people who would want to join a famous club full of...
Classic self-selection problem, same as people always say about MENSA: it's not an unbiased sample of high-IQ people, it's a group of high-IQ people who would want to join a famous club full of other high-IQ people. Stephen Hawking wasn't a member, but the creator of Dilbert is. Rationalist communities seem perfect for attracting science cranks.
The only card carrying MENSA member I've ever personally met is a Nazi, so evidently you don't need to actually be smart to join. Really robs it of any and all prestige in my eyes
The only card carrying MENSA member I've ever personally met is a Nazi, so evidently you don't need to actually be smart to join.
Really robs it of any and all prestige in my eyes
Race science and eugenics came from scientists. And there were plenty of scientists in the Third Reich who saw the "lesser races" as perfectly fine to experiment on and torture. I've always been...
Race science and eugenics came from scientists. And there were plenty of scientists in the Third Reich who saw the "lesser races" as perfectly fine to experiment on and torture.
I've always been sour on the idea that STEM should be taught without the humanities, or ethics, or sociology because I think it's how you create people who think IQ is both one-dimensional and can be accurately measured without bias.
Quite a bit of time has passed since them, if you still believe the same thing as biased scientists believed the better part of a century ago then I'd say you're either intellectually lazy or just...
Quite a bit of time has passed since them, if you still believe the same thing as biased scientists believed the better part of a century ago then I'd say you're either intellectually lazy or just stupid.
And if you believe that intelligence is a measure of your worth then I also think you're stupid, as a former 'gifted kid' I had to learn that intelligence doesn't matter and the way to be a good person is to actually be a good person; to treat others with respect and compassion. If I could learn that as a kid then I don't have much respect for people who still haven't learned it as adults.
There's an active financed effort to "rehabilitate" race science under the label of "human biodiversity." Bioethicists have been flagging it for at least the past few years and you can see the...
There's an active financed effort to "rehabilitate" race science under the label of "human biodiversity." Bioethicists have been flagging it for at least the past few years and you can see the consistent devaluing of disabled lives, poor and POC reproductive rights, etc. across much of the political spectrum.
It is unfortunately being shored up as a "rational" belief mostly from people who are not, unsurprisingly, bioethicists or biologists or geneticists but people who find it supports their world view of their own superiority. Unfortunately many of those people have audiences and money, because of course if you're popular and rich you must be smart in all things and thus superior. At least this is my theory on it all, it all feels very circular in that all the problems feed into each other.
Yea, I've heard about that. It's scary that there's actual money behind it. I still maintain that the scientists accepting that money aren't smart, no matter how intelligent you are, if you...
Yea, I've heard about that.
It's scary that there's actual money behind it.
I still maintain that the scientists accepting that money aren't smart, no matter how intelligent you are, if you demonstrate that you're stupid then you're stupid.
As an aside I don't really get why people would want to be a member of the 'master race' in the first place, doesn't that devalue all your own achievements?
Focusing on the "intelligence" of the people involved in a white supremacist movement misses the point for me. I don't believe in a single faceted measurable intelligence - or at least I don't...
Focusing on the "intelligence" of the people involved in a white supremacist movement misses the point for me. I don't believe in a single faceted measurable intelligence - or at least I don't think w understand how to measure the complexity that is intelligence, nor do I think that being smart makes one ethical or kind.
The point is they're being eugenicists and white supremacists. Trying to convince them this "devalues" their own achievements does not seem likely to get them to stop.
I wrote a previous comment with some linked resources for more info on what alarm bells are being rung
I don't think we actually disagree about anything, we're just using words differently. I don't really have a criteria for intelligence because I don't care about intelligence, basing my self worth...
I don't think we actually disagree about anything, we're just using words differently.
I don't really have a criteria for intelligence because I don't care about intelligence, basing my self worth on how intelligent teachers thought I was made me a worse person because I didn't do any introspection. If I was already good then I didn't need to consider how bullying and demeaning my friends made me bad.
I do however have a criteria for being stupid: doing or believing stupid (and harmful) things.
And I don't really know to convince eugenicists and white supremacists that they're wrong, that was just a personal observation.
I don't think that's the motivation because the conclusions tend to be that east asians and ashkenazi jews are more intelligent on average than caucasians. Any specific goal is probably closer to...
As an aside I don't really get why people would want to be a member of the 'master race' in the first place, doesn't that devalue all your own achievements?
I don't think that's the motivation because the conclusions tend to be that east asians and ashkenazi jews are more intelligent on average than caucasians. Any specific goal is probably closer to proving that african and aboriginal ethnicities are various levels below others.
Though I don't see how being more intelligent would devalue any achievements to be honest.
My reasoning is that if you believe that you're good at everything just because of your race instead of effort on your part then you didn't really do anything to earn those achievements, similar...
My reasoning is that if you believe that you're good at everything just because of your race instead of effort on your part then you didn't really do anything to earn those achievements, similar to being successful at business because of your own hard work and skill vs getting where you are because of nepotism and access to vast amounts of interest free money.
It's informed by the inverse. My mom grew up during Apartheid and she has told me how inadequate that made her feel. If she was supposed to be one of god's favourite people and she was just average then comparatively she must actually be below average.
I don't really want to play devil's advocate for these people, but I don't think that's what they believe, at least the ones writing about it online. Generally, as is surely not surprising, there...
I don't really want to play devil's advocate for these people, but I don't think that's what they believe, at least the ones writing about it online. Generally, as is surely not surprising, there seems to be an overlap between racists and certain ultraconservatives or various alt right sub groups, who both comonly have an insistence on working hard, and working for themselves or their immediate surroundings as opposed to being forced to work for society in general.
What I've seen is more in tune of "they are genetically not smart enough and too lazy to work and be as good as us, hard working men" or what could be shortened to "as opposed to them, we are capable". The people in discussions seem to commonly point out achievements of other people instead of their own, but they still ultimately focus on actual achievements, crime (very common) etc. instead of whiteness as the ultimate achievement.
It cannot be overstated just how much evidence cherrypicking goes into these worldviews. They don't make any sense except via the specific mental gymnastics each of them uses to distract...
It cannot be overstated just how much evidence cherrypicking goes into these worldviews. They don't make any sense except via the specific mental gymnastics each of them uses to distract themselves from the obvious. Most of the time it's as simple as "I'm Good, Mama and Papa were Good, Mama and Papa said we're White and Good, and those people are Bad and Not White, Mama and Papa said they're Bad because they're Not White." Any introspection has to get past the assumption of their own righteousness, and most people struggle with that.
I think actual geneticists are doing pretty well on ethics nowadays. I've posted a few articles here from Sasha Gusev's blog. It seems a bit too technical for a general audience, but I've learned...
I think actual geneticists are doing pretty well on ethics nowadays. I've posted a few articles here from Sasha Gusev's blog. It seems a bit too technical for a general audience, but I've learned a few things from it.
My takeaway is that even large-scale genetic studies have subtleties and limitations that make them hard to summarize in non-technical terms. Getting practical, real-world lessons from them is often difficult and error-prone. Nonetheless, there is progress in the field.
I don't think it's actual geneticists who are pushing racist ideology, I said quite the opposite. But there is an active attempt to "wash" it and other eugenic beliefs as legitimate science once more.
I don't think it's actual geneticists who are pushing racist ideology, I said quite the opposite. But there is an active attempt to "wash" it and other eugenic beliefs as legitimate science once more.
Even if we assume a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart, what kind of smart person would seek out a group like this? If the...
Even if we assume a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart, what kind of smart person would seek out a group like this?
If the motivation is hanging out with smart people, academics hang out with smart people every working day anyway, so they probably wouldn't be as pushed. Same for many people in the private sector of intellectual fields. I could see former academics, former post-grads etc. being drawn to it though.
If the motivation is proving themselves, it implies they don't (yet) have anything more substantive to their name. Again, reduces the chances of attracting the accomplished or people with 'smart-sounding' jobs.
There are obviously going to be many counterexamples! I'm just talking about relative likelihoods here.
This is going to bias selection toward people not (currently) working in intellectual fields and those on the insecure side. I will now mention that the stereotypical "squaring the circle" maths crank is a retired engineer who becomes irate when his pet theory is criticised. Many are very intelligent, but they're pursuing hugely ambitious goals in subjects outside their own expertise while accepting no corrections or feedback.
You're making an fictional scenario in "a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart" and then applying the limitations that apply to...
You're making an fictional scenario in "a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart" and then applying the limitations that apply to real world Mensa ("only weird people who didn't achieve anything yet would join"), which cannot do the idealized screening because it's impossible.
I'm telling you right now that if such idealized group of people existed, I would definitely join and I think many others would too. I met some brilliant people in academia, but few of them were well-rounded enough to be experts in more than one field (similar to what I studied), so the things we could talk about were limited. It's similar in many expert professional fields. I really value my doctor friends for example because we can share interesting and advanced things that the other knows very little about. Having friends in wildly different fields is also very useful for connections when doing whatever. When I was attempting to start a tiny company that built and sold designer hifi loudspeakers, having good connections with mutual respect to people who did marketing and graphic design was invaluable. But they're also just interesting people to meet.
I was writing some more anecdotes but honestly getting to know very smart people is just a topic in my life and I don't think I'm alone in this at all. And it's both genuine interest and practical usefulness. Many successful smart people do seek out precisely this as well through various private clubs - those are often gatekept using money, but not exclusively, and financial interests are not nearly the only reasons for their existence.
For this article, I spoke to ten people who were associated with various rationalist-adjacent groups, including Black Lotus, Leverage Research, and the Zizians. I also spoke with people who were familiar with the early development of the rationalist community. I myself am a rationalist, and the rationalist community is closely knit; my interviewees included exes, former clients, and the dad of my kid’s best friend. I am close to my subject in a way most journalists aren’t. At the same time, I got an unprecedented level of access and honesty from members of a community that is often hostile to outsiders.
Here’s another take on rationalist cults that I thought really exemplifies the mindset of these people. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ygAJyoBK7MhEvnwBc/some-thoughts-on-the-cults-lw-had
Here’s another take on rationalist cults that I thought really exemplifies the mindset of these people.
I suppose the question is: would they be "true rationalists" if they are in a cult? At the end of the day it seems to me that it's just a glitch of human bonding. Whether they identify as...
I suppose the question is: would they be "true rationalists" if they are in a cult?
At the end of the day it seems to me that it's just a glitch of human bonding. Whether they identify as rationalist or not seems to be an afterthought. There are cults of many kinds. The fact that these types identify as rationalist despite not being so is particularly funny.
I’m glad the article sidestepped the definition issue to focus more on what happened. They were seekers attracted by rationalist rhetoric, at any rate. There is no official membership.
I’m glad the article sidestepped the definition issue to focus more on what happened. They were seekers attracted by rationalist rhetoric, at any rate. There is no official membership.
It should be footnoted that the author, Ozy Brennan, is not someone completely outside the rationalist community and that they have over a decade of presence within and surrounding these...
It should be footnoted that the author, Ozy Brennan, is not someone completely outside the rationalist community and that they have over a decade of presence within and surrounding these communities and are not necessarily an independent and unbiased voice. They are themselves a self-declared rationalist even while the article itself is written in a more objective etic tone. This fact does not completely discount what they say (nor their interviewing) but perhaps this article should be read with the lens of the LDS church doing damage control investigating and evaluating the RLDS church, or vice versa.
The article hits it pretty well, but my own personal experience has been that groups or individuals that believe they have some inside line on the RightTM way to think have a bad habit of going weird. Not that there aren't exceptions, like the article points out. But speaking purely of personal experiences, that rationalists I've run into, which were the higher functioning ones referenced in the article, were also rather unpleasant conversationalists and tended toward the odd.
Rationalists tend to believe that being open-minded about weird ideas and willing to discuss them seriously is a strength. Weird ideas might be wrong, but they might just be overlooked by the mainstream.
You’re also supposed to test new ideas, scientifically if that’s feasible, but it’s often difficult to do in practice.
It’s fairly rare that being willing to go beyond mainstream consensus pays off. I think the beginning of the pandemic was a good example of that, though. You needed a certain willingness to look weird to start stocking up on supplies and wearing masks before everyone started doing it. (Some authorities even put out word not to buy masks because medical staff needed them and they weren’t shown to be effective for regular people.)
For another example of a weird idea around that time, apparently there was a study that the COVID-19 virus didn’t survive as well on metal surfaces, so some rationalists started wrapping doorknobs with copper. I don’t think there’s any evidence that this worked, but the attitude was, it might help, and we shouldn’t be afraid to try it just because it looks weird.
There are downsides to this attitude, like when people get too attached to rather speculative ideas. Especially for people who aren’t great at critical thinking, rejecting anything that sounds too weird is usually a good heuristic.
Compare with the heuristic that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s usually a good way to avoid financial scams, but it will occasionally miss a good bet.
I remember reading some rationalist posts doing some soul-searching after the cryptocurrency boom along the lines of “hey, we’re supposed to be open-minded about weird ideas, so why didn’t we get in early on this?” (I mean, I think a few people did get in early, but it mostly wasn’t taken seriously.)
Right, being open minded isn't a bad thing. But an idea is a dangerous thing if it's the only one you have and you construct argument after argument to circle back to that idea.
But I do think it's worth differentiating ideas and forcing thought patterns. Like the article mentioned with the zizians, much of their violence and oddness stemmed from forcing their decision making through a specific philosophy.
So it's less that rationalists entertain ideas outside the mainstream (which they do), and more that they sometimes try and force the complexity of the world into a single, sometimes inflexible, way of thinking. Which creates seemingly strange jumps in logic to people who don't subscribe to their views. And sometimes those jumps and their desire to rationalize them are alarming.
I think this is pretty spot on. I've read a bunch of stuff by them and I think I sort of understand their way of thinking: turn off all the heuristics in your brain and start going around trying to do stuff from first principles.
It's a very brittle, overly nimble way of thinking. If you start doing random experiments and believing the results at p<0.05, you only need to do about 20 of them before you've adopted a false belief. And if you've turned off all your heuristics (nobody else is doing that, that would upset people, that would look weird, I've never heard of that happening, that's gross, etc.) you end up willing to take quite radical action based on things you think are probably true.
This can make rationalists dangerous to be around, because they'll turn on you immediately if they think the math says they should, and they've turned off their defenses against people manipulating the math. With enough of them about, you can get people assassinated by credibly promising to hand out enough bed nets in the event of their death, because they don't always take their analysis out to higher-order effects.
A good treatment of rationalism takes it all the way out to things like credible commitments to being a community member who is valuable to others and safe to be around. And I hear rumors that if you do rationalism well enough you get back around to something called "virtue ethics". But at that point it kind of starts to lose its distinctive "charm".
Maybe you read something different, but I don’t think “turn off all the heuristics” is a fair characterization of the rationalist articles I’ve read.
To be fair, everyone should have at least 1 month of food stockpiled.
I do now, because we have the space, but I didn’t used to. We could probably stretch our pantry a couple months if we had to.
I used to have like maybe a day or two worth of food cause I didn’t really know how to cook and I was living with 5 room mates in a 3 br and none of them knew how to cook either.
Id keep spaghetti, oatmeal, granola bars, maybe a frozen meal or two and thats it. Whenever I did want to actually cook I had to go to the store to get perishables. I feel like most people are like this.
Theres so many people who don’t keep any food at all in their living space. I saw posts of people who got covid, lived alone, didn’t have access to food delivery so they’d just starve for a couple days while they were sick.
Totally insane to me.
I get the no-space argument, but I think it's completely wrong. People seem to envision keeping a giant stockpile of all their usual foods, meticulously organized. You don't need that.
A 25 lb bag of rice, a big bottle of multivitamins, and a bowl to cook the rice in. It can fit under a chair, and it will provide almost all of the calories and a bare minimum of nutrients 1 person needs for a month. It'll be boring, but sure as shit beats starving.
You might want a sealed container to keep pests out of the rice. There are plastic dogfood containers that work well.
Buying potatoes in bulk might work for some people, depending on what you normally eat.
Space and budget allowing, the five gallon buckets with gamma seal lids are amazing for bulk staples.
My understanding via the wild bird food store is that rats can and will chew through plastic containers, you have to put the food in a metal container with a tight fitting lid if you want to protect against them. I ended up doing this with the alfalfa meal I use as fertilizer because I wasn’t willing to risk rats in my garage. Apparently alfalfa is basically chocolate to rats.
I bring this up because I’m imagining someone breaking into that stockpile in desperation and finding nothing but a hole in the side and rat poop.
Yeah, outside storage, or where that's can get to would be tough. I keep bird seed in metal canisters outside. For indoor pantries though, the food safe five gallon buckets and gamma seal lids should be fine unless you've got a real rat problem, and is pretty much the same way restaurants store large amounts of food.
But I've never really needed to deter rats, so people who do should be careful.
Yeah I think for me it was really just that I was young and didn’t know how to cook or prep or anything. I might have kept a huge bag of rice around if I even knew those existed and also knew how to cook rice.
We keep two of those in the pantry now, I think they last about five years before they start tasting gritty.
Copper is used as a passive antimicrobial surface in hospitals for some time now. It is not a "weird idea", it's actually been around centuries. In fact, other specific metals have been identified as antimicrobial and have had medical use for some time as well - silver, gold, titanium and zinc all have various antimicrobial properties.
Modern research on these metals includes the attempt to use them in nanoclusters inside the body (or topically at the site of the wound) to help control infections and spread, and combinations of the materials with electrostatic materials have been explored to increase their effectiveness.
Good to know! Sure, it made sense.
But I meant "weird" in the social sense of looking weird, socially. If you went to someone's house and found that they had wrapped all their doorknobs with copper strips, that would probably seem pretty weird?
Other examples at around that time: we met with a contractor who (cheerfully) didn't want to shake hands and suggested an alternative.That seemed eccentric and my wife even wondered if it was somehow racist (a common notion at the time), but in retrospect he was just ahead of the curve and good for him.
I remember suggesting that my wife wear a mask grocery shopping and getting some resistance.
Later, of course, it became common and then required, but there was still that brief time period when society was a bit slow to react and people who were early had to push past some social resistance.
Often what I've observed at least from encountering some rationalist writers/content at a distance, is that they really don't deserve to have co-opted the term "rational"/"rationalist" because they have polluted the term.
What I often see, rather than a focus on just rationality/reason alone, is a tendency to coldly quantify and over-analyze everything in a way that they think is removing bias, but often is at the expense of considering other facets of things, often human aspects, and really is just crafting its own narrow lens, but marketing it as "rational"
In some ways I think this has led to a lot of "making things look scientific" (not sure if there's a word for this), but basically because you have all this data, and graphs, and logic about something, it gives it an "air" of scientific rigor, regardless of if that's true or whether X, Y, or Z should even be looked at only from that angle.
It reminds me of people so deeply ingrained in a particular way of thinking (engineering or otherwise) that they start applying that model to everything, even mundane or social things in their own life where even social situations are just another technical problem to be solved
It is no surprise that some of the worst figures of the tech world / Silicon Valley have embraced the movement- it lends itself to technocratic ideas. Even rationalists' focus on AI safety seems mostly to be from the "existential" / "sci-fi AI takeover" angle that actually pushes the industry's own rhetoric about how "intelligent" the systems actually are, rather than any of its immediate, already-felt harms. It's all about the potential of a singularity / super-intelligence, rather than the social impacts already happening.
Edit / addition: David Gerard wrote about this AI doomerism and rationalism's origins and connections to it recently and it's also worth reviewing his part about the rationalists' massive racism problems and defense of discredited racist "science"
Rationalists were AI doomers long before the current AI boom got started. I think a better way to put it is that a lot of the AI doomer stuff came from them and the industry has co-opted it. (OpenAI was originally founded by people worried about AI, hence the weird non-profit structure, and look how that turned out.)
see also: rationalwiki, which is completely unrelated to the rationalists and has a completely different set of issues that is at least as large. It seems to keep happening with people who choose the name.
I don't even think this approach has to necessarily lead to nonsensical outcomes. But you have to accept and understand less rational facets of human life like emotional needs and really think things through, and you need to have similarly non-psychopathic goals. I think the usually problem lies in either of those things.
edit: also, regarding focusing on AI doomerism instead of immediate problems, I actually think this is sensible to some degree. I see the rationale as "this is one of the most paradigm changing and at the same time fastest developing technologies in human history, it has a high potential to radically change our lives, and we tend to be really bad at long-term thinking in general, so something changing this fast may just be bad enough to be catastrophic unless somebody realizes the risks quickly enough". I don't know if I'm on their side regarding the conclusions from this, but I think this rationale is correct.
Beware that rationalists have haters who like to say nasty things about them on RationalWiki. It’s not unbiased.
But yes, “rationalist” is a somewhat unfortunate name that stuck for describing this particular community.
Perhaps I worded it wrong, but I meant to say that RationalWiki, despite being unrealted to rationalists, is another community that claims to focus on rationality despite being quite biased and not exactly rational. Perhaps the word itself is a potential red flag when used in this way.
I think the word that best applies is pseudo-intellectualism.
I’m not sure it’s a meaningful distinction because most intellectualism is pseudo-intellectualism, including lots of famous names in history. Even people who do real work will often pontificate on subjects outside their expertise.
But a particular pattern I see in the rationalist community is what I call science as metaphor. For example, Bayesian probability is a big deal, so people use the word “prior” a lot and use p-values to describe their beliefs (“what’s your p(doom)”), but rarely do they ever do any statistical calculations.
Science as metaphor is hardly restricted to rationalists, though. Some common words we use now like “feedback” were originally technical terms that got co-opted via being used as metaphor.
Emphasis mine. I don't really have anything to add since I don't know much about rationalists. Don't think I've ever met one IRL or even online, as far as I know.
But I did find that quote interesting. Very much a double-edged sword. Especially since it's easy these days to do your own "research" online.
Honestly, I don't think Taylor's take on this is exclusive to rationalists. I think this is something that came up with the internet, and was later super-charged by social media's recommendation algorithms: it gave people the ability to build their own global echo chambers, because finding like-minded people has become so damn easy.
While this has also lead to a lot of good, the bad side of it is that people automatically become less trusting of institutions, because they spend so much time on their phones, getting pushed sometimes borderline propaganda which entrenches them further in their beliefs.
People are inherently lazy, like all animals. It is rare for us to seek out material that challenges us all the time. It is much easier for us to accept a new fact that fits in with our own mental model of the world. Recommendation algorithms coupled with the fact that our attention has been monetized means that there is a ton of money being made by people sliding down the extremist pipeline. There is simply a lot of people who are not smart enough to understand that the only reason they accept some fact given by a stranger on the internet is that they already agree with it.
Like with all things, governments were way too slow to react and education has lost multiple generations to this, and the problem is that public education is an institution, which is going to have a hard time reviving the idea of trusting in institutions among those who don't trust in them.
We have had quite vivid examples of untrustworthy and even malicious government action lately, so it’s not like this distrust is entirely wrong. Unfortunately, distrust in government seems to feed populism, which makes the government more untrustworthy.
The problem, as with everything, is that "not trusting the government" is is a very broad range, going all the way from "people shouldn't need driver's licenses to drive a car" type libertianism towards "maybe we don't need 15 regulations and expensive certifications every 5 years for mundane screws".
At the risk of sounding like an elightened centrist:tm:, a lot of the sauce is finding the sensible out of all of these opinions and ideologies and slapping them together into something that works for you. Of course, centrists then also falls for the trap of extremists where they think that harmful opinions are okay as long as they're expressed nicely.
Many well-intentioned centrists rely on information and feelings which are most readily available to them. Moderation and compromise in terms of maintaining a status quo relies on unshifting alternatives. As one party moves more to the right they bring the median option closer to the right. It's difficult to evaluate things fairly by comparing them to the visible alternatives when the visible alternatives are not honest takes and thus not a balanced representation of thought. This is essentially the median mechanism--including when choosing representative candidates when the diversity of thought is biased and leans a certain way.
If you are taking the time to listen to and adopt solutions from extremists, is that still centrism? When does centrism become something that looks more like rationalism than centrism? Is centrism logical consistency, evidence-based reasoning, and a systematic analysis of problems and solutions, regardless of whether those solutions fall on the left or right of the political spectrum? Well... that's the philosophical position of rationalism. I guess centrism focuses more on social stability at the expense of logical consistency, yes? The pursuit of middle-ground at the expense of evidence and reason.
The thing is that despite all of those valid criticisms of rationalists, my experience with them is that they tend to be smarter than at least 95% of the population including most of their critics. So if rationalists cannot escape this, what does that tell us about humanity in general.
The lesson, of course, is to be more humble, but that doesn't negate that the problem still exists.
Smarter than ≥95% of the population is a pretty bold statement, given that in western nations, ca. 10 to 20% of the populace is university educated.
“Above average for college grads” doesn’t seem implausible for well-known rationalist bloggers. (Since I’ve never met any in person, I couldn’t say more than that.)
I honestly don't think so at all, and I'm saying that in the context of living almost entirely in a university educated social bubble. But I admit that like skybrian I only know the ones that post online, especially on blogs but also forums. But those tend to be the most visible and therefore also criticized ones anyway.
What's double plus weird is that this "do your own research" trait often lines up very well with this trait:
The loophole is that they're not trusting in the authority to make decisions, they're trusting the authority's toolset to free themselves to be able to make their own decisions. Accepting the assigned slot isn't giving in to authoritarianism, it's earning a justified reward for having done the work.
Classic self-selection problem, same as people always say about MENSA: it's not an unbiased sample of high-IQ people, it's a group of high-IQ people who would want to join a famous club full of other high-IQ people. Stephen Hawking wasn't a member, but the creator of Dilbert is. Rationalist communities seem perfect for attracting science cranks.
The only card carrying MENSA member I've ever personally met is a Nazi, so evidently you don't need to actually be smart to join.
Really robs it of any and all prestige in my eyes
Race science and eugenics came from scientists. And there were plenty of scientists in the Third Reich who saw the "lesser races" as perfectly fine to experiment on and torture.
I've always been sour on the idea that STEM should be taught without the humanities, or ethics, or sociology because I think it's how you create people who think IQ is both one-dimensional and can be accurately measured without bias.
Quite a bit of time has passed since them, if you still believe the same thing as biased scientists believed the better part of a century ago then I'd say you're either intellectually lazy or just stupid.
And if you believe that intelligence is a measure of your worth then I also think you're stupid, as a former 'gifted kid' I had to learn that intelligence doesn't matter and the way to be a good person is to actually be a good person; to treat others with respect and compassion. If I could learn that as a kid then I don't have much respect for people who still haven't learned it as adults.
There's an active financed effort to "rehabilitate" race science under the label of "human biodiversity." Bioethicists have been flagging it for at least the past few years and you can see the consistent devaluing of disabled lives, poor and POC reproductive rights, etc. across much of the political spectrum.
It is unfortunately being shored up as a "rational" belief mostly from people who are not, unsurprisingly, bioethicists or biologists or geneticists but people who find it supports their world view of their own superiority. Unfortunately many of those people have audiences and money, because of course if you're popular and rich you must be smart in all things and thus superior. At least this is my theory on it all, it all feels very circular in that all the problems feed into each other.
Yea, I've heard about that.
It's scary that there's actual money behind it.
I still maintain that the scientists accepting that money aren't smart, no matter how intelligent you are, if you demonstrate that you're stupid then you're stupid.
As an aside I don't really get why people would want to be a member of the 'master race' in the first place, doesn't that devalue all your own achievements?
Focusing on the "intelligence" of the people involved in a white supremacist movement misses the point for me. I don't believe in a single faceted measurable intelligence - or at least I don't think w understand how to measure the complexity that is intelligence, nor do I think that being smart makes one ethical or kind.
The point is they're being eugenicists and white supremacists. Trying to convince them this "devalues" their own achievements does not seem likely to get them to stop.
I wrote a previous comment with some linked resources for more info on what alarm bells are being rung
I don't think we actually disagree about anything, we're just using words differently.
I don't really have a criteria for intelligence because I don't care about intelligence, basing my self worth on how intelligent teachers thought I was made me a worse person because I didn't do any introspection. If I was already good then I didn't need to consider how bullying and demeaning my friends made me bad.
I do however have a criteria for being stupid: doing or believing stupid (and harmful) things.
And I don't really know to convince eugenicists and white supremacists that they're wrong, that was just a personal observation.
No I think we agree, just being clear on where my focus was!
I don't think that's the motivation because the conclusions tend to be that east asians and ashkenazi jews are more intelligent on average than caucasians. Any specific goal is probably closer to proving that african and aboriginal ethnicities are various levels below others.
Though I don't see how being more intelligent would devalue any achievements to be honest.
My reasoning is that if you believe that you're good at everything just because of your race instead of effort on your part then you didn't really do anything to earn those achievements, similar to being successful at business because of your own hard work and skill vs getting where you are because of nepotism and access to vast amounts of interest free money.
It's informed by the inverse. My mom grew up during Apartheid and she has told me how inadequate that made her feel. If she was supposed to be one of god's favourite people and she was just average then comparatively she must actually be below average.
I don't really want to play devil's advocate for these people, but I don't think that's what they believe, at least the ones writing about it online. Generally, as is surely not surprising, there seems to be an overlap between racists and certain ultraconservatives or various alt right sub groups, who both comonly have an insistence on working hard, and working for themselves or their immediate surroundings as opposed to being forced to work for society in general.
What I've seen is more in tune of "they are genetically not smart enough and too lazy to work and be as good as us, hard working men" or what could be shortened to "as opposed to them, we are capable". The people in discussions seem to commonly point out achievements of other people instead of their own, but they still ultimately focus on actual achievements, crime (very common) etc. instead of whiteness as the ultimate achievement.
It cannot be overstated just how much evidence cherrypicking goes into these worldviews. They don't make any sense except via the specific mental gymnastics each of them uses to distract themselves from the obvious. Most of the time it's as simple as "I'm Good, Mama and Papa were Good, Mama and Papa said we're White and Good, and those people are Bad and Not White, Mama and Papa said they're Bad because they're Not White." Any introspection has to get past the assumption of their own righteousness, and most people struggle with that.
I think actual geneticists are doing pretty well on ethics nowadays. I've posted a few articles here from Sasha Gusev's blog. It seems a bit too technical for a general audience, but I've learned a few things from it.
My takeaway is that even large-scale genetic studies have subtleties and limitations that make them hard to summarize in non-technical terms. Getting practical, real-world lessons from them is often difficult and error-prone. Nonetheless, there is progress in the field.
I don't think it's actual geneticists who are pushing racist ideology, I said quite the opposite. But there is an active attempt to "wash" it and other eugenic beliefs as legitimate science once more.
Even if we assume a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart, what kind of smart person would seek out a group like this?
If the motivation is hanging out with smart people, academics hang out with smart people every working day anyway, so they probably wouldn't be as pushed. Same for many people in the private sector of intellectual fields. I could see former academics, former post-grads etc. being drawn to it though.
If the motivation is proving themselves, it implies they don't (yet) have anything more substantive to their name. Again, reduces the chances of attracting the accomplished or people with 'smart-sounding' jobs.
There are obviously going to be many counterexamples! I'm just talking about relative likelihoods here.
This is going to bias selection toward people not (currently) working in intellectual fields and those on the insecure side. I will now mention that the stereotypical "squaring the circle" maths crank is a retired engineer who becomes irate when his pet theory is criticised. Many are very intelligent, but they're pursuing hugely ambitious goals in subjects outside their own expertise while accepting no corrections or feedback.
You're making an fictional scenario in "a group could flawlessly screen for intelligence somehow, and everyone admitted was genuinely very smart" and then applying the limitations that apply to real world Mensa ("only weird people who didn't achieve anything yet would join"), which cannot do the idealized screening because it's impossible.
I'm telling you right now that if such idealized group of people existed, I would definitely join and I think many others would too. I met some brilliant people in academia, but few of them were well-rounded enough to be experts in more than one field (similar to what I studied), so the things we could talk about were limited. It's similar in many expert professional fields. I really value my doctor friends for example because we can share interesting and advanced things that the other knows very little about. Having friends in wildly different fields is also very useful for connections when doing whatever. When I was attempting to start a tiny company that built and sold designer hifi loudspeakers, having good connections with mutual respect to people who did marketing and graphic design was invaluable. But they're also just interesting people to meet.
I was writing some more anecdotes but honestly getting to know very smart people is just a topic in my life and I don't think I'm alone in this at all. And it's both genuine interest and practical usefulness. Many successful smart people do seek out precisely this as well through various private clubs - those are often gatekept using money, but not exclusively, and financial interests are not nearly the only reasons for their existence.
From the article:
I don't have any personal connection with rationalists as described in this article but it was fascinating.
Here’s another take on rationalist cults that I thought really exemplifies the mindset of these people.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ygAJyoBK7MhEvnwBc/some-thoughts-on-the-cults-lw-had
Simple. Nobody is immune to propaganda, and people want to belong. They want to escape reality.
Even for so called "secular" or "rationalist" people.
I think that’s a little too simple because it ignores how much the people attracted to a community vary.
True, they vary, but honestly they don't seem to vary that much. As long as it has the same underlying root which it typically does.
I don’t believe it applies very well for rationalists in general, though it may apply for some of them.
I suppose the question is: would they be "true rationalists" if they are in a cult?
At the end of the day it seems to me that it's just a glitch of human bonding. Whether they identify as rationalist or not seems to be an afterthought. There are cults of many kinds. The fact that these types identify as rationalist despite not being so is particularly funny.
I’m glad the article sidestepped the definition issue to focus more on what happened. They were seekers attracted by rationalist rhetoric, at any rate. There is no official membership.
It should be footnoted that the author, Ozy Brennan, is not someone completely outside the rationalist community and that they have over a decade of presence within and surrounding these communities and are not necessarily an independent and unbiased voice. They are themselves a self-declared rationalist even while the article itself is written in a more objective etic tone. This fact does not completely discount what they say (nor their interviewing) but perhaps this article should be read with the lens of the LDS church doing damage control investigating and evaluating the RLDS church, or vice versa.
Yes, he says he’s a rationalist at the beginning of the article, in the part I quoted.
LOL I must've skimmed over that
I remember reading this part
but not this part.
I guess that's what I get for splitting the reading over two days :-)