Comment by analog31

In philosophy grad school, we described this as 'being reasonable' as opposed to 'being rational'.

That said, big-R Rationalism (the Lesswrong/Yudkowsky/Ziz social phenomenon) has very little in common with what we've standardly called 'rationalism'; trained philosophers tend to wince a little bit when we come into contact with these groups (who are nevertheless chockablock with fascinating personalities and compelling aesthetics.)

From my perspective (and I have only glancing contact,) these mostly seem to be _cults of consequentialism_, an epithet I'd also use for Effective Altruists.

Consequentialism has been making young people say and do daft things for hundreds of years -- Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ being the best character sketch I can think of.

While there are plenty of non-religious (and thus, small-r rationalist) alternatives to consequentialism, none of them seem to make it past the threshold in these communities.

The other codesmell these big-R rationalist groups have for me, and that which this article correctly flags, is their weaponization of psychology -- while I don't necessarily doubt the findings of sociology, psychology, etc, I wonder if they necessarily furnish useful tools for personal improvement. For example, memorizing a list of biases that people can potentially have is like numbering the stars in the sky; to me, it seems like this is a cargo-cultish transposition of the act of finding _fallacies in arguments_ into the domain of finding _faults in persons_.

And that's a relatively mild use of psychology. I simply can't imagine how annoying it would be to live in a household where everyone had memorized everything from connection theory to attachment theory to narrative therapy and routinely deployed hot takes on one another.

In actual philosophical discussion, back at the academy, psychologizing was considered 'below the belt', and would result in an intervention by the ref. Sometimes this was explicitly associated with something we called 'the Principle of Charity', which is that, out of an abundance of epistemic caution, you commit to always interpreting the motives and interests of your interlocutor in the kindest light possible, whether in 'steel manning' their arguments, or turning a strategically blind eye to bad behaviour in conversation.

The importance Principle of Charity is probably the most enduring lesson I took from my decade-long sojurn among the philosophers, and mutual psychological dissection is anathema to it.