Comment by alphazard
4 days ago
The terminology here is worth noting. Is a Rationalist Cult a cult that practices Rationalism according to third parties, or is it a cult that says they are Rationalist?
Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that.
There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rational. None of these people have ever seen a demon, so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data. I doubt these people would be willing to make any bets about when or if a demon will show up. Many of us would be glad to make a market concerning predictions made by tabletop games about physical phenomenon.
Yeah, I would say the groups in question are notionally, aspirationally rational and I would hate for the takeaway to be disengagement from principles of critical thinking and skeptical thinking writ large.
Which, to me, raises the fascinating question of what does a "good" version look like, of groups and group dynamics centered around a shared interest in best practices associated with critical thinking?
At a first impression, I think maybe these virtues (which are real!) disappear into the background of other, more applied specializations, whether professions, hobbies, backyard family barbecues.
It would seem like the quintessential Rationalist institution to congregate around is the prediction market. Status in the community has to be derived from a history of making good bets (PnL as a %, not in absolute terms). And the sense of community would come from (measurably) more rational people teaching (measurably) less rational people how to be more rational.
The founder of LessWrong / The Rationalist movement would absolutely agree with you here, and has written numerous fanfics about a hypothetical alien society ("Dath Ilan") where those are fairly central.
The article is talking about cults that arose out of the rationalist social milieu, which is a separate question from whether the cult's beliefs qualify as "rationalist" in some sense (a question that usually has no objective answer anyway).
>so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data.
There's a reason they call themselves "rationalists" instead of empiricists or positivists. They perfectly inverted Hume ("reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions")
These kinds of harebrained views aren't an accident but a product of rationalism. The idea that intellect is quasi infinite and that the world can be mirrored in the mind is not running contradictory to, but just the most extreme form of rationalism taken to its conclusion, and of course deeply religious, hence the constant fantasies about AI divinities and singularities.