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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Do you think these guys could have been saved somehow through information? Like if you had the magic ability to sit them down for an hour, what would you tell them? It’s scary that a group of apparently intelligent people could have their explicit aim as improving the world, and know that rationalists exist, and then just do… this. Note that the glossary is huge, and that developing new words is a hallmark of cults, probably because it allows you to define all of the connotation and ambience and dimensions of words which affect cognition invisibly.

As I understand it, there may be genuine self-induced brain damage in play, so probably no.

It wasn't a lack of information that drove them to this, but a sense of humiliation and resentment.

Rationalists have always had the ability to rationalize their conclusions. It's in the moniker, even as leagues of human behavioral science and decades of examples have demonstrated that rationalization is often done to justify what people wanted to do anyway, i.e. rationality is often a cover rather than a cause of behavior. People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalizeare in some ways more vulnerable to self-deception or rationalizing their irrationalities due propensity to confirmation bias on the basis of their own presumed rationality/IQ compared to those opposing them, particularly those who don't engage on the paradigm they're claiming from the start.

Just like it's hard to convince people who believe they will go to heaven for an eternity of bliss if they die killing the right people that living in the flawed reality is better, it's hard to convince people who have abstracted their actions and consequences into independent / imaginary spaces (parallel world lines, abstract group-level competition) that they are working against their defined interest. It doesn't matter if the consequence negatively affects this current context- the promise / payoff is outside your bounding context.

People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalize

Of course they do not.

Rationalists pride themselves on their ability to spill oceans of ink denouncing rationalization, trying to figure out how best to uncover one's own past rationalizations, and trying to come up with ways to avoid rationalizing.

You could argue that they're not completely successful at this (and they'll agree), or that they're not at all successful (and they'll hear you out), but to argue that they're doing the opposite is just weirdly wrong.

My opinion is that, per another commenter's allusion to geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, the rationalist community currently comprises three groups:

  1. People who really value the truth for its own sake, even if it's uncomfortable, and who sincerely want to get better at reasoning and recognising their own biases - "not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions... a dojo for people learning to resist them."
  2. People who are self-aware enough to recognise that many of their beliefs are probably false or rest on extremely shaky reasoning, but are reluctant to abandon them, typically because it would be socially disadvantageous to do so. Instead, they turn to rationalism in search of ever more outré and convoluted reasoning with which they can justify clinging to their obviously erroneous belief in beliefs, aiming to suppress their nagging doubts about them via overwhelming streams of abstruse jargon - essentially Gish-galloping themselves in addition to the people around them. I think @Dean is absolutely correct in describing what this group does as "rationalisation".
  3. Cargo-cultists who lack even the self-awareness of the second group, and who dress up the beliefs they hold (which they arrived at via the typical algorithms of social conformity) using the superficial language associated with the rationalist community, with zero understanding of the more complex and reflective insights and concepts generated by the first group. Rationalism as a community and fashion statement, and nothing more.

What's interesting is that some people who are scrupulously in group 1 most of the time can fall into group 2 only for certain specific beliefs, typically if the social pressure is great enough. Coming out and saying you're not onboard with gender ideology is a great way to get yourself disinvited from parties in the Bay Area.

I suspect that every sufficiently large community eventually undergoes such a process of degeneration, in much the same way that the moral principles explicitly endorsed by Christianity don't necessarily tell you much about the moral character of the religion's adherents. And rationalists, of all people, should know better than pulling the No True Rationalist schtick - a community is only as good as the people in it, and this episode makes it abundantly clear that the rationalist community (just like any other sufficiently large community) contains some pretty odious people who can hide in plain sight by adopting the vernacular and parroting the appropriate shibboleths. See also effective altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Rationalism is a rationalization.

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