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Aren’t you tired of accusing rationalists of not caring about the things they care the most about? I can’t think of a group less prone to appeals to authority, more aware of the replication crisis .
And again with an anecdote where your counterpart just comes off as obviously wrong. The guy doesn’t understand, then he lies about it. No one is encouraging this behaviour, so what lesson is there to be gained here.
As long as you’re free-associating: the russians are quokkas apparently, while 0HP and co, the edgy panaroid hysterical pessimists, they’re wise. Why then is there such affinity between them?
They’re very similar, and wrong in the same way. They systematically overestimate the likelihood of defection. Cooperation and honesty appear impossible, and lies are all they ever hear. What should the russians have done? Assume everyone up and down the chain of command was lying even harder than previously assumed? You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
Past a certain point of skepticism/assumed lies, you ‘ve sawed off the last epistemological branch you’re sitting on, sink into the conspiracy swamp, and you become a blackpill overdose/russian type, confused and afraid of your own (possibly fish-like) shadow.
The problem lies the other way, they care too much, and by jingo do they go for appeals to authority - the maths says it is so, ergo it must be so! I don't think the AI debate is balanced at all; on one side there are "AI is gonna foom and kill us all!" doomsayers and on the other side are the "nonsense, AI will solve all the problems we can't because it will be so smart and we'll have Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism!" and both sides are expecting that to happen in the next ten minutes.
The real problem, as always, are the humans involved, not the machines. And we're already seeing it with people rushing to use GPT-model whatever and blindly trusting that the output is correct - our lawyer with the fabricated cases is only the most egregious one - and forecasting that it will take all jobs (and make us obsolete)/(we'll be freed up for new jobs just like the buggy whip manufacturers got new, hitherto unthought of, jobs) and the rest of it.
Prediction markets are another blind spot, the amazement that people would spend real money to manipulate results the way they wanted was "what do you think is going to happen if we adopt these markets widely?" for me.
Rationalists are very nice people - and that's part of the problem. I think quokkas is unfair, but there's a tendency to think that just thinking hard enough will get you a solution that, when implemented, will work beautifully because everyone will act in their own self-interest and nobody will fuck shit up just because they're evil-minded or screw-ups. Spherical cow world.
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Should I be?
The obvious question that I think needs to be asked is "what predictions does you model make? and in what way are they better than mine?"
Mostly I’d like you to defend your assertions, but sure, I’ll take predictions, if you got them. What are they? That rationalists will blindly follow authorities? That russians are too trusting? That if you compare a poll of rationalists to any other group you care to name, rationalists will be very agreeable, supportive of credentialism, and especially unlikely to know or care about the replication crisis?
Rationalists, for you, are whatever you need them to be in the moment, all in the service of your long-running one-man outgrouping campaign. If someone says rats are smart, you ‘ll say smarts and psychopathy are correlated (wrong), or that their preferred moral system reflects psychopathy. The next moment they’re fluffy, trusting animals. If religion is discussed, according to you they’re neurotic contrarians, but on politics and science, they worship authority. None of it is ever justified by more than your feeling, or even given any sort of scale, like : here's other educated classes for comparison. You lump rats in with the woke for your “grand” theories, while agreeing with every anti-woke word they write the rest of the time.
What am I, chopped liver?
Rationalism is a dead-end. It, like every expression of the Enlightenment before it, is a katamari-ball amalgamation of checks its meta-conceptual ass can't cash. Intelligence being orthogonal to benevolence is a core axiom of the movement when it comes to AI, so why shouldn't that generalize to rationalists themselves? Fundamental lack of necessary mental safeguards is in no way incompatible with "psychopathy"; see the stories about rationalists "debugging" each other, compartmentalization of information across power-imbalances coupled with expectations of absolute loyalty to the group, the engineering of mythic narratives that swamp one's instincts for self-preservation and so on. There've been a number of post-mortems laying out the dirty laundry over the last while, and it's all exactly what one would naïvely expect: people who thought they knew better who did not in fact know better, people who thought they really had seen the skulls making more skull-piles. It's totally possible for a group to be typified by both fluffy-animal trust and psychopathy; that's the default failure mode of cults. The fluffy-animal trust in the areas where it's inappropriate is what lets the psychopathy bloom most fully.
In a similar fashion, people can be neurotic contrarians about one issue, and rigid conformists about another; all it takes is motivated reasoning in favor of one issue and against the other. Rationalists did not actually discover a solution to motivated reasoning, to bias, to social pressure, despite the entire clique being founded on the idea that they had in fact done so. That's what makes them worse than the general mass of humanity: they think they've solved these problems, that they're somehow pushed beyond the limits of human nature. They think they're less wrong, when in fact they're often exactly as wrong and sometimes considerably wronger.
And sure, there are valuable insights here and there, gleaming among the conceptual ruins. There's valuable lessons to take away, and not just cautionary ones either, though those do seem to predominate. Sure, they had some amazingly useful things to say about wokeness, before it conquered them utterly. It behooves us to draw what utility we can from the tools they forged, but it is also necessary to learn from their mistakes.
(If this is too much raw assertion of the sort you criticized above, feel free to highlight the elements that seem incorrect, and I will make an effort to dig up the specific examples.)
You and @HlynkaCG show up every day to our little club and insist you’re not members. Fine, you’re welcome to a seat regardless, but in ‘over-socialized’ fashion, you are incapable of truly rebelling against rationalism/ the enlightenment, you just accuse it of failing to live up to its ideals. “You think you’re sceptical? You’re not sceptical enough! You think you’re smart, but you’re … dumb! You care about winning, but you’re losing! You wish to avoid deaths, you’re causing them ! etc” .
The only reason the criticism bites is because rats care far more than anyone else about them. You’re accusing a bunch of neat freaks of dirtyness, as if a single spot proved overall dirtyness. Where is the baseline? Rigid conformists, compared to whom? The woke, bible-thumpers, Charles I, medieval theologians?
Your constant steelmanning of god-fearing simple folk rings hollow. If you could produce one, he would have no idea wtf you’re talking about. If it appears that they don’t have a justification for obeying the king or the ten commandments, it’s because they never had one.
The enlightenment is the only reason someone even asked that question, and you attempt to answer it. “Historical proof that tradition works! Children! Life satisfaction! Less skulls!” I hear you say, but those reasons are embedded within, and fundamentally acceptable to, a rationalist framework. Were you a true-blue peasant, you wouldn’t need those things, you’d do as you’re told, and go blindly where the priests lead you.
It's my club as much as it's yours, at this point, three exiles down the line. What we insist on is that distinctions seem relevant.
I disagree, but I suppose it comes down to how you define "Rationalism" and "the Enlightenment". My guess, speaking reductively, is that you'd assert that Rationalism is, essentially, the drive to be less wrong, and the Enlightenment is something like the pursuit of truth through human reason. I disagree on both counts, and my evidence would be what the people involved say and do. Rationalism fails to appreciate the hard limits imposed on rationality by human nature and human frailty, and so traps many of its own adherents in moral mazes of their own design. The Enlightenment, from the start, used scientific and technological advancements as a skin-suit for an ideology that had nothing to do with either. It generated a vast midden-heap of false knowledge, and hundreds of millions of people died or were immiserated as a result. Einstein and Von Neumann were not the poster-children of the Enlightenment, but Freud, Skinner, Dewey and the rest of their ilk. The point was never dispassionate science, but passionate ideology, then and now.
As for rebellion, I argue that death and pain are morally neutral. I think that's a pretty solid starter against either. In any case, nothing precludes Rationalism and the Enlightenment from being failures by their own values as well as by mine, and pointing this out seems fair play to me.
I'm not sure that's true. Progs generally seem to feel the bite pretty keenly, given how they generally react to criticism of their goals and achievements. What's different here is that we're supposed to make an actual argument, rather than simply deploying mean girl shit to crush all opposition.
It seems to me that Rationalists still believe that Studies Show. They look at the replication crisis, and they look at the long, long string of technocratic policy failures over the last fifty to a hundred years, and they look at the obvious, numerous, glaring errors and perverse incentives in Academia, and they still insist that it's rational to reason on the basis of that system's generated "knowledge". They look at a corpse liquid with decay, imagine it's their high-school sweetheart, and pucker up for a kiss.
They try to think better, which in practice seems to amount to finding reasonably persuasive memes, and then engaging significant social pressure against anyone who dissents from the Correct Answer. "Shut up and multiply", naïve utilitarianism, and the whole idea of Coherent Extrapolated Volition fall into this bucket, along with quite a bit of the rest of the AI and EA classics. They imagine that they've Found Answers, and then they try to use those answers, sometimes they hurt people, and sometimes they burn value. (And sometimes they actually do some good, at least temporarily. I greatly admire their work on bed nets. Their obsession with animal suffering, much, much less so.)
So where's the baseline to compare that to? Unsurprisingly, I'll compare it to my church. The fact that we're Christians is probably game, set and match for you; what could possibly be less rational? And yet, I find the results preferable. The people in my church helped pull me out of a mental tailspin once upon a time. They gave me love and community. I found a wife there. I have a family now. When the breakdown of our society left me with a burning ocean of rage and hate inside me, the tools I'd picked up second-hand from a steady diet of Rationalist thought did nothing but stoke that fire ever hotter. Amusingly enough, it was my church, and a simple conversation with @HlynkaCG here, that extinguished that fury, to my inestimable benefit. That's why I argue alongside him in these threads: because I've experienced, viscerally, how deeply correct and necessary his particular perspective can be.
Conformity has positives and negatives. It seems to me that Rationalists manage to engineer away most of the positives, while leaving the worst negatives in place. Presuming it were so, that seems like a reasonable thing to criticize. Whether it is so or not is of course a different argument.
...I think what you're trying to express here is the idea that, before the Enlightenment, people simply did what they were told without thinking, with obedience to kings and to the Ten Commandments being two examples of this purportedly sheeplike behavior. The problem is that this line of reasoning is absolutely fucked. There have been no shortage of rebellions and revolutions against kings throughout history, for a whole variety of reasons, and there have been no shortage of loyal populations for a wide variety of reasons beyond sheeplike obedience. Likewise, it is not obvious to me why one would need sophisticated arguments for obeying the Ten Commandments; they're relatively straightforward, and point to obviously beneficial ways of life in any social context.
In my experience, no, they really aren't. They require certain concessions and leaps of faith that are not, strictly speaking, rational, by any measure but the results. Rationality could not help me with my rage and hate, because my rage and hate were, strictly speaking, rational, evidence-based, logically sound. It took an explicit abandonment of the Rationalist obsession with the pursuit of power and control to halt that spiral. Other examples would be the evergreen meme of rationalist-founded religions, rationalist approaches to dating and relationships, the rationalist attitudes toward risk and value and much else besides.
Yeah, that's... not really how it works, or ever has, or ever will. I'm not a Neo-reactionary, worshipping hierarchy, and Rationalism does not have a monopoly on rationality, on logic. Amusingly enough, I'm not even sure that you and I disagree all that strongly on the object-level, and this isn't all a dispute about definitions. But if you believe that Rationalism or the Enlightenment invented critical thinking, I'm not sure what to tell you, other perhaps than you should think hard about where such a foolish idea came from. Do you honestly believe that all people before, say, the 1600s were incapable of reason? Do you think that the overall level of superstition and magical thinking has actually gone down over time? On what basis would you suppose such a thing? On what evidence?
They were certainly capable of reason, it’s just that the opponents of the enlightenment would tell them to shut up, often by force of arms. Our friend’s object of admiration, Thomas Hobbes, was censored and nearly labeled a heretic by the english monarchy, the law went "the committee should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan.", forcing him to publish in amsterdam for the rest of his life.
What you defend has a name : obscurantism. And your intellectual forebearers wouldn’t even give the peasants a translation of the bible, so they literally believed what I said about the priests leading the blind. Do you disagree that the enlightenment meant education for the masses, and the discussion of ideas and justifications for the stuff they used to have to believe on faith (and stick)? Mistakes were made, sure, but for once they were their mistakes, and not those of their corrupt, self-appointed shepherds. Bite the bullet like moldbug already, burn the heretics and keep the peasants in their rightful place.
How do you explain the massive correlation between the ‘age of reason’ and technological advancement (and life expectancy, etc) if one has nothing to do with the other? How can you look at the post-enlightenment world and think ‘immiseration’? I don't think the numbers back you up on that.
Please, give me the names of “common-sense” contemporary critics of the enlightenment you apparently identify with. I predict there aren’t any, because they were all obscurantist censors who didn’t know anything and wanted to know even less. That’s why you and Hlynka can never quite explain from what intellectual tradition you hail from. There’s nothing there, just obscurantism and reason. That’s the mystery at the heart of the ‘Inferential distance’, not some earthy wisdom.
So no, I don’t think we would be having this conversation without the enlightenment. I probably wouldn’t know how to read, and at best I’d be burning my writings like Hobbes did to avoid the Inquisitor General’s attention.
I’m glad religion helped you like homeopathy helps some people, but I don’t choose ‘my truth’ by its therapeutic effects.
Censorship is a universal component of all human societies. Enlightenment societies are no different.
I point out that all societies censor. You claim I am defending obscurantism. To the extent that all societies are obscurantist for relatively straightforward and unavoidable reasons, sure, I guess. I like functional society, and it appears straightforwardly true that some information can be quite harmful to society's function. Crucially, I see no evidence that you have a workable alternative, rather than an imaginary one.
What makes them my intellectual forebears? I'm not Catholic, though I note that prior to the invention of the printing press, mass literacy and mass distribution of bibles probably wasn't physically possible. There's no point in teaching people to read when there's literally nothing for them to read. As soon as printing was developed, Protestant nations leaned hard into building universal literacy and wide distribution of bibles, which made book production and general education a practical possibility. All this paved the way for the Enlightenment, note.
Yes I do, because education for the masses started first and probably made the Enlightenment possible, and because a lot of the core Enlightenment beliefs seem very obviously based on faith and sticks. The concept of social progress, of the infinite perfectibility of man, the idea of social engineering and especially the ideas of what it could accomplish, were not rationally-grounded or scientific in any meaningful sense. The Enlightenment vanguard believed they could solve human nature, straight up, and it is intellectually dishonest to allow them their after-the-fact rationalizations and walk-backs. They believed that ignorance, sickness, poverty and crime were the results of mismanagement by society's leadership, not emergent properties of human nature, and they killed a lot of people based on this entirely magical belief. They conceal these failures through relatively unsophisticated lies about the historical record, by retroactively assigning all positive aspects of history to themselves and all negative aspects to their opponents, regardless of the facts. They've been winning for so long that few people actually poke at the lies, but once one does they pop like a soap bubble.
Mass literacy was always going to produce an explosion of knowledge, and it arrived because technological development was already running up the exponential curve. The Enlightenment came after these trends were already well progressed, and throughout the era it followed or even retarded progress, rather than leading. The French Revolution sold itself as explicitly scientific and reason-based, but its social and political theories were bullshit, and it did not in fact significantly advance science relative to, say, England or America. Individual Devout Christians and devout Christian societies have frequently made significant contributions to actual science, while the Enlightenment was a wellspring of destructive pseudoscience from its inception to now. Rousseau was not a scientist, and neither was Marx, nor Freud, nor Dewey, nor Skinner. These men were driven by a single coherent, consistent ideology, by the idea that they could solve human nature. They and many others like them built the social sciences, and through them much of the world we live in, and none of them were constrained in the slightest way by truth or objective facts. It's true that many actual scientists saw themselves as contributing to the Enlightenment project, but this is to their detriment, not the Enlightenment's credit. To the extent that, say, Einstein could not recognize that Freudianism was pseudoscience, that speaks poorly of Einstein's abilities as a scientist. Freudianism, like most explicit products of the Enlightenment, never had the slightest empirical foundation. It did not make accurate predictions. It did not deliver significant results. It was a con job from the start, and why it worked as well as it did is a question that deserves careful examination.
A huge part of the point I'm trying to get across here is that claiming to FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE is not the same as an actual commitment to scientific truth. The standard Enlightenment line is that someone who believes in God and rigorously obeys the scientific method in empirical matters is less of a scientist than a proud atheist who spends their life proliferating baseless pseudoscientific bullshit until it's assumed common knowledge society-wide. This sort of ass-backwards fuckup recurs regularly throughout the history of the Enlightenment, and that historical reality is a serious problem for the consensus narrative as I understand it.
C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and H. L. Mencken would be three to start. Are those contemporary enough?
Axioms are a choice, and they have observable results. Philosophical commitments are not homeopathy, nor are they therapeutic. Some beliefs are simply more adaptive than others, and some Rationalist beliefs are very, very maladaptive, in the same way that embracing short-time-horizon unrestrained hedonism is maladaptive. The Rationalist obsession with control is one such maladaptation.
You said yourself we don’t even disagree that much on the object level issues. That’s why it’s a shame that your anti-enlightenment theory makes it seem that we have more values difference than we really do.
One point where we disagree is censorship, you are more in favour of it than I am. The enlightenment was anti-censorship. This is a rare example of your theory managing to cleave reality at the joints and actually explaining something.
“Censorship is unavoidable” , “They didn’t have anything to read” – yeah, yeah, but the questions that matter here are : How much censorship, and should they get more to read? The enlightenment and anti-enlightenment sides took positions here, don’t evade.
The censorship issue is a good template to evaluate the rest of your theory. Do we disagree on an issue now, and is it traceable to the enlightenment/anti-enlightenment kerkuffle?
On Marx, Freud, most of the woke stuff we discuss endlessly, I don't disagree with you, despite this presumed enlightenment-borne ideological distance between us.
On total social engineering vs brutal state of nature, I don’t disagree with you and have never thought otherwise. The first time I heard about Rousseau was from this short, pudgy, adorable, and very opinionated french teacher, who told us she couldn’t stand ‘that scoundrel’ Rousseau, who despite writing the celebrated On Education, abandoned all his children to an 18th century orphanage as soon as they were born. And later in the course, on the “do as I say, …” part of his life, it was clear to me that hobbes was right and rousseau was wrong. So when you two accuse me, along with everyone else, of being inveterate rousseau-ians, I’m left scratching my head.
Sorry, I meant contemporary in the sense of ‘living or occurring at the same time.‘, not recent time. Ie, anti-enlightenment thinkers from the time of the enlightenment.
It might not be a bad idea to do the definitions thing after all: “The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. wikipedia “
Which of those am I supposed to repudiate? (I have my problems with natural law.) It seems to me you want to claim a large chunk of those as not-enlightenment for your strange theory, unlike a true reactionary. So what are we even talking about?
It might just be a big misunderstanding: You say you oppose the enlightenment, people hear the above definition and object, when in reality you mean rousseau, anticlericalism, plus some other shit you tacked on, and people don’t even disagree with you on rousseau.
Else, if you want to argue for absolutism and theocracy, against reason, happiness, liberty and empiricism, please say so clearly and don’t bring Freud into it.
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