* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
It's like this:
I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.
Ask any cryptographer how well that works.
This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.
What's an example of one?
I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.
yes, frequently
https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=i%20was%20wrong
IMO it seems to happen more often than in most other online communities
Their leaning towards fascism is some sort of reductionism for these people I think. In essence political violence make the perpetrators more powerful than if they were nice playing liberals given the same popular support. Thus fuscism. Q.E.D.
Way too little focus on second or third order effects.
Rightwing radicals that 10 to 30 years ago would say they are libertarians are now fascists instead. It is really strange to witness. I think there is a lack of focus on second or third order effects. It is just problem and superficial cause. How hard can it be, just do it, etc.
Whether society eats the people at the bottom or not doesn't matter to them, they just want to be at the top.
If AI is at the top then they will be thrown into the hypothetical meat grinder [0] they thought they were safe from. So AI is the devil to them because it breaks their ideology at its core.
[0] Is it hypothetical if a rationalist is scared of it?
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Right, one could make that statement. It would be silly, but they could make it. I think most people who consider themselves good at basketball are probably better than average at basketball.
> That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Is the notion that someone who's not good at basketball can't recognize a good basketball player?
I'm a little confused by your metaphor.
I should note that you changed the statement from say to consider themselves. It is entirely possible (and rather frequent) for people who do not consider themselves good at basketball to say that they are. People who actually are good at basketball quite often do not feel the need to say so, because it is apparent when they play.
I can change "consider themselves to be rationalists" to "say they are good at basketball" because that is just a change of premise. It leaves the structure the same.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
Opinions based on insufficient information help immensely in determining whether we have sufficient information, and also raise awareness of important topics that we need more information on. These blog posts serve a very important role in the information exchange ecosystem and the whole world would be worse off if all these people held off until they're 99% certain. Nobody would be talking about climate change, about economy, about quantum gravity, about ancient civilizations, about prehistoric animal species, etc. etc. and so on.
People in the rationalist community don’t see it, because ironically they’re not rational enough. But they use the language and essay format to make it seem like they are.
I wrote in a sibling post that they like fascism because any dispute can be reduced to and solved by beating the counterpart to death with sticks.
It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.
My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".
Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.
It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.