Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

> They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement. “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”

The article as a whole is meh, but that quote made skimming it worthwhile.

I've never been impressed by the "rationalist" community around SSC, LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, etc., but I've really struggled to put my finger on it. This gets pretty damn close.

The whole sphere struck me from the beginning (way before present controversies) as a big circle jerk of smart people trying to impress each other. The standard issue rationalist flex is to pick a contrarian point of view and invent an extremely novel argument for it. Bonus points if it skirts close to something controversial or taboo, but doesn't quite cross the line. Then an endless thread of discussion can ensue where all the participants have an opportunity to flex by either agreeing or taking apart the argument.

Problem is: I never got the sense that anything was being accomplished, nor that the ideas coming out of these places stood up when dragged out of their bubbles and examined in the context of the wider world and the wider sphere of human experience.

The first thing that really put me off was the whole idea of runaway super-intelligent AI. Please, please, please for the love of g-d study some biology. Dunning-Krueger is a worn out meme but I think the idea of it applies well to CS people talking about intelligence (as opposed to glorified statistical regression) without knowing anything about biology, which is the only existing example of an intelligent system.

The neo-racist ("human biodiversity") and neoreactionary stuff just put me off further. When it emerged it didn't surprise me one bit that it came from those circles. Contrarian? Check. Controversial? Check. Elitist? Check.

In the end I started thinking of it as an online cult, sort of a really high-brow companion to the 'chans. I guess the hierarchy goes: rationalist sphere > 'chan culture > Qanon.

I don't think this is fair, and I generally am not a fan of the community either.

I don't think they are trying to impress each other, or are contrarian for the sake of it. I think it's a fair amount of legitimately smart people who don't have much in the way of life experience, may be in part on the autism spectrum, and tend to be engineer/rational types who think systematically more than intuitively. I mean they construct and deal with systems.

This leads to sort of a naivety that tends to look for elegant explanations of a sort and is vulnerable to them. The all-explaining system of thought that in general intellectuals tend to get ensnared by, but is self-contained and self-perpetuating. The idea of the messiness or stickiness or even corrosiveness of life on these systems tends to not be entertained much, as it reduces the power of rationality.

So the rationalists get really vulnerable to these kind of left-field ideas like AI risk, or neo-reaction. These ideas are often rationally elegant in the way many negative systems are; they are a novel way of explaining things. The red pill/manosphere stuff was similar; as a system of thought it's a lot more elegant and explanatory to its audience than the alternatives, and even criticized actual things as well as its own untrue things.

I guess I'm saying is that it's more the rationalists are vulnerable to getting captured by those contrarian ideas you describe than they are malicious or doing it to flex. It's not really unique to them, academia goes through it, philosophers go through it, artists go through it, etc.

As for the cultish stuff, its apparent to me that a lot of rationalists are kind of adrift in real life due to the great unpersoning of religion and its replacement with woke or trumpian politics. Thats part of why the grey tribe was coined, neither left nor right. They need meaning as well as anyone.

IMO the entire ecosystem is just by and for people with high personality-trait Openness. If you write a blog that presents novel ideas in interesting ways, you get a readership full of people that like reading novel ideas presented in interesting ways. Nothing really more interesting or complicated going on here - people rarely have one weird idea, they tend to be idiosyncratic or conformist in general.

> rationalists are kind of adrift in real life due to the great unpersoning of religion and its replacement with woke or trumpian politics

Interesting point. It's a collectivist religion for people who despise "religion" and "collectivism"

honestly i don't think they despise it; they seem a lot friendlier to it at least on social grounds. But everyone needs meaning; the religious force is in everyone, and if religion is weakened, well, transhumanism can easily replace it

Hanson is very pro-Scott and funnily enough much more contrarian and sucked into what the nyt would think of as questionable beliefs based on analysis than Scott is. Quoting him like this is downright amusing and only just dishonest enough to push you towards having a negative opinion without being 'wrong'.

I pretty much agree with your characterisation of LessWrong (and i think Yudkowsky is a complete waste of time), but i found SSC to be much better. Part of the same scene, but much closer to reality. I wouldn't write off SSC for LW's failings.

Unrelatedly, i think your description also applies to modern Continental philosophy / critical theory - it's far more a game to prove who has the biggest brain than it is a real attempt to do anything useful.

Yes, I agree about a lot of critical theory too. There’s a lot of Chinese finger traps for the brain around. We fixate on this stuff like raccoons with shiny objects.

One of my litmus tests is usefulness or potential usefulness. I define this broadly to include social and aesthetic stuff as well as utilitarian concerns. Even with a broad definition a lot of this brain wank just strikes me as useless and not really applicable to anything.

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