Comment by pizzadog
4 days ago
I have a lot of experience with rationalists. What I will say is:
1) If you have a criticism about them or their stupid name or how "'all I know is that I know nothing' how smug of them to say they're truly wise," rest assured they have been self flagellating over these criticisms 100x longer than you've been aware of their group. That doesn't mean they succeeded at addressing the criticisms, of course, but I can tell you that they are self aware. Especially about the stupid name.
2) They are actually well read. They are not sheltered and confused. They are out there doing weird shit together all the time. The kind of off-the-wall life experiences you find in this community will leave you wide eyed.
3) They are genuinely concerned with doing good. You might know about some of the weird, scary, or cringe rationalist groups. You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.
In my experience, where they go astray is when they trick themselves into working beyond their means. The basic underlying idea behind most rationalist projects is something like "think about the way people suffer everyday. How can we think about these problems in a new way? How can we find an answer that actually leaves everyone happy?" A cynic (or a realist, depending on your perspective) might say that there are many problems that fundamentally will leave some group unhappy. The overconfident rationalist will challenge that cynical/realist perspective until they burn themselves out, and in many cases they will attract a whole group of people who burn out alongside them. To consider an extreme case, the Zizians squared this circle by deciding that the majority of human beings didn't have souls and so "leaving everyone happy" was as simple as ignoring the unsouled masses. In less extreme cases this presents itself as hopeless idealism, or a chain of logic that becomes so divorced from normal socialization that it appears to be opaque. "This thought experiment could hypothetically create 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain to exist, so I need to devote my entire existence towards preventing it, because even a 1% chance of that happening is horrible. If you aren't doing the same thing then you are now morally culpable for 9 quintillion cubic units of Pain. You are evil."
Most rationalists are weird but settle into a happy place far from those fringes where they have a diet of "plants and specifically animals without brains that cannot experience pain" and they make $300k annually and donate $200k of it to charitable causes. The super weird ones are annoying to talk to and nobody really likes them.
> You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.
People do gossip about charitable successes.
Anyway, aren't capital-R Rationalists typically very online about what they do? If there are any amazing success stories you want to bring up (and I'm not saying they do or don't exist) surely you can just link to some of them?
One problem is, making $300k annually and donating $200k of it to charitable causes such as curing malaria does not make an interesting story. Maybe it saved thousands of lives, maybe not, but we can't even point at specific people who were saved... and malaria still exists, so... not an interesting story to tell.
A more exciting story would be e.g. about Scott Alexander, who was harassed by a Wikipedia admin and lost his job because he was doxed by a major newspaper, but emerged stronger than before (that's the interesting part), and he also keeps donating a fraction of his income to charitable causes (that's the charitable part, i.e. the boring part).
Most rationalists' success stories are less extreme than this. Most of them wouldn't make good clickbait.
But are they scotsmen?
this isn't really a 'no true scotsman' thing, because I don't think the comment is saying 'no rationalist would go crazy', in fact they're very much saying the opposite, just claiming there's a large fraction which are substantially more moderate but also a lot less visible.
This has been my experience too. Every rationalist I know personally is a well read reasonable person
A lot of terrible people are self-aware, well-read and ultimately concerned with doing good. All of the catastrophes of the 20th century were led by men that fit this description: Stalin, Mao, Hitler. Perhaps this is a bit hyperbolic, but the troubling belief that the Rationalists have in common with these evil men is the ironclad conviction that self-awareness, being well-read, and being concerned with good, somehow makes it impossible for one to do immoral and unethical things.
I think we don't believe in hubris in America anymore. And the most dangerous belief of the Rationalists is that the more complex and verbose your beliefs become, the more protected you become from taking actions that exceed your capability for success and benefit. In practice it is often the meek and humble who do the most good in this world, but this is not celebrated in Silicon Valley.
IMO we can’t define hubris anymore. The concept has become foreign.
We should conceptualize it the way the Ancient Greeks did, which is the belief that human ingenuity can somehow overcome the will of the gods.