I relate a lot. I have not read a lot of rationalists articles, but it seems to me that a lot of what they do is share ideas amongst themselves, but these ideas are not necessarily true or important, merely interesting. Few of these ideas have anything to do with the real world.
Nassim Taleb talks about putting skin in the game as a way to escape this intellectual circle jerking, because when you confront ideas with reality is the only way to know if there's any true truth to them. This follows Karl Popper's falsification principle: if your idea cannot be falsified (in the real world), then it's worthless.
I think the reason why there are no successful rationalists is because they don't want their precious ideas to actually be tested in the real world, they'll rather keep them unopened like collectionists do, and just admire them.
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Notes -
I relate a lot. I have not read a lot of rationalists articles, but it seems to me that a lot of what they do is share ideas amongst themselves, but these ideas are not necessarily true or important, merely interesting. Few of these ideas have anything to do with the real world.
Nassim Taleb talks about putting skin in the game as a way to escape this intellectual circle jerking, because when you confront ideas with reality is the only way to know if there's any true truth to them. This follows Karl Popper's falsification principle: if your idea cannot be falsified (in the real world), then it's worthless.
I think the reason why there are no successful rationalists is because they don't want their precious ideas to actually be tested in the real world, they'll rather keep them unopened like collectionists do, and just admire them.
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