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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   21307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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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.

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