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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1219 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Reacting to this video explaining the different rationlist communities specifically on the post-rat section, which I'm most affiliated with at the moment.

Post-rationalism basically came out of a lot of more rigorous critiques of rationality and utilitarianism as systems for modeling the world. It essentially concluded that a huge part of the human experience cannot be legibly modeled, at least with our current understanding of the world, and that trying to do so leads to a ton of major failure modes.

For instance, he mentioned the repugnant conclusion earlier in the video, which is one of the major issues in utilitarianism, along with the idea of the utility monster. Those made a lot of people start questioning rationalism, including myself, along with other famous problematic thought experiments like the trolley problem, etc.

But of course, as he does mention, there is also a lot of meditation and drug use, especially psychedelics, in the post-rationalist community, and that definitely plays into people realizing that rationality and legible statistics have major limits when it comes to describing actual reality.

There is also a heavy overlap with the sort of evolutionary or vitalist strain of thought championed by Peterson and earlier Carl Jung, where the idea is that from an evolutionary perspective, religion has a lot of power because even if it is not strictly true in an objective or rational sense, it leads to more fitness and better outcomes. Therefore it is superior, even if under one frame of mind it is not strictly explainable or coherent.

Also he didn't mention us here at the Motte or the CW thread spinoffs at all. Total Motte erasure!!!

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