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I've always thought of it is a certain contrarian approach to questions and attempting to think through things from first principles, which makes it more glaring when you do hit an unquestionable topic. Reading the Sequences and Scott is part of that, but not necessarily required.
Then again I only ever considered myself "rationalist-adjacent" because of the other weird sex stuff that seemed to be a cultural signifier. Rather like EA, I like rationalism as an idea, not as a movement or culture.
Well, I tend to think that 'rationalist' is a motte-and-bailey.
The motte of rationalism is thinking more clearly and making more accurate judgements. Who could possibly be opposed to that? It's entirely uncontroversial and a very easy sell.
The bailey of rationalism is therefore Yudkowsky, the Sequences, the communal Less Wrong project, and then adjacent authors like Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, I think of a whole kind of blog-space that includes people like Tyler Cowen or Bryan Caplan, and then also this California Bay Area subculture that includes things like polyamory, social ineptitude, singularitanism, and so on. Not all rationalists are into cryonics, but you'll understand what I mean when I say that "lol cryonics" is one of the criticisms of rationalists I run into.
Obviously I support the motte of rationalism, but everybody would. It's the vast bailey that I find extraordinarily questionable, and frequently both factually and morally wrong.
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