My Falling-Out with the Rationalist Community: From Skeptics to Cults

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked.

"Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...

> What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the [email protected] mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.

One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...

Damore wasn't a rationalist but his memo was at least somewhat reasonable, and didn't merit him being cancelled.

> From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn

Do people do this in practice? 80K for example (EA not rat, but EA is the policy arm of rationalism after all) expressly warn against this. Feels like a strawman.

Admittedly I'm quite removed from the Bay Area rationalists, but I get the perception that unlike with many other ideological communities, you could always lay out your countervailing opinion with evidence. You could disagree on many things and still be in conversation with the community. Stuff including early stuff like the Sequences are subject to criticism and reevaluation. If my perception is correct, then imo a community that is (in parts) in critical conversation with itself seems more grounded to me than the usual strongly ideological and religious communities.

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)

The fascinating thing to me about rationalism is that it has its routes in scepticism, and particularly atheistic scepticism, and yet it seems to have evolved into, essentially, the 21st century's first notable religion.

(Though in a way that feels a little derivative; I suspect that many of the principals just took _Hyperion_ _way_ too seriously, tbh...)

Oh man I love this:

"Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality."

So many "things" where its "we're the good guys club and if you're not in our club you're the bad guy".