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Im a bit surprised noone talked about it last week, but a big post came out about the history of Leverage Research. It was a major organisation in the same social circles as early Rationalism, but fell into disgrace shortly before covid after thoroughly driving themselves insane with woo/cult adjacent stuff. I was somewhat familiar with the case from back then, but reading this some things really came together for me, and I feel I now understand much better why the in-person rats are like that.
Reading this, there where many times where people seemed to me stupidly impressed by something. What little Ive seen of Anders (the founder/leader) psychological theory, that convinced so many he was worth working with, was the same. Why did they fall for this?
I think its because many of the people who got into Rationalism/EA/etc, did it because they Fucking Love Science. There really arent many places now where people believe in the power of science to transform the world in a big way, beyond what you need to rattle off to secure grants/investments, and it makes total sense that these people would be enamoured with it. There was of course also methodological thinking going on in rationalism, but these people would variously: adopt something from it as their shiny new tool, learn others as a shibboleth only, or saw the issue in self-improvment rather than understanding. They didnt do a systematic evaluation of methods generally, and keep it as a going concern in the back of their head, the way someone else might have done, and might have expected more people to do, if they didnt have in-person contact.
I dont want to blame them for this too much; I didnt get deep into methodology because I saw it as necessary for my journey to science utopia, either. I like science and all, but I got into methodology because I find it interesting for its own sake; from the rationalist perspective, Im drastically lacking in agency/urgency, its just that this is less personally harmful and more socially normal than what happened to them.
Measuring from the other end, the only case I clearly know of who really did develop significant methodological understanding because he thought it was neccessary for his project, is Yud. What did it take to make him do that? He thought he had previously been on course to destroy the world. The defense rests its case.
The "scene" is also bigger than just Rationalism, and the people who got into Leverage very deep may not have had as much contact with it as we might think someone moving to SF for this would. Still, a lot of social pathologies in the ratsphere make far more sense to me with a weaker version of this mechanism in mind.
There's a lot to unpack here. But what strikes me is that so many "rationalists" turn out to be susceptible to basic bitch woo tactics.
You would expect a hard core of rationalist autists who wouldn't fall for this, but it seems hard to decide a priori who they are, and certainly many of the characters here would seem to fit the bill. It's unclear to me to what extent rationalism is even protective against this stuff, certainly many people in the genpop would head for the door once the crystals come out.
If you can fool rationalists with the usual bag of tricks, that seems pretty bad for the "rationalists should win" project.
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The difference between superstitio and religio goes both ways. Nonreligious people can believe in, and regularly do believe in, ghosts, animism, astrology, voodoo, etc.
I wonder if sometimes that's a natural result of forming a sufficiently complete/complex model of reality to basically explain almost everything you encounter, and yet realizing it is still incomplete, or unsatisfactory. You keep having to push back the explanation of 'where it all came from' to the big bang and then... what?
If there's not something else out there, and if that something doesn't transcend our understanding of physics, then how in the hell did we get the rules known as 'physics' in the first place?
And if you can't let that thought rest, it opens the door to many things being possible. Believing in ghosts isn't so 'odd' if you're already theorizing about alternate timelines and the existence of higher dimensions that could harbor intelligent life.
And of course, the belief in superintelligence being possible... well that creates an opening for all sorts of weird things that could happen to you.
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I did my Mormon mission in the Czech Republic. The Czechs have been in a fierce competition with the Estonians for a few decades over how can be the most atheist country in the world. Estonia appears to have a slight edge in the competition. Estimates range from approximately 1/2 to about 2/3 of the country being atheists.
Having talked to an extremely high number of (ostensibly atheist) Czechs about religion, I learned something important: being nominally atheist often doesn't mean believing in strict adherence to rationalism, the scientific method, etc. as a source of knowledge. I'd estimate that the overwhelming majority of "atheist" Czechs believed in what could loosely be called "new age gibberish" or "woo".
My point being: most people are not actually rationalists, and it's not surprising to see this, even amongst self-proclaimed rationalists. I'm not either, I think it's a retarded ideology, largely for reasons that were best covered by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he talks about "men without chests" so I won't retread them here. But people who are strict about adherence to finding knowledge exclusively through "rational" methods are the exception, not the rule. Even amongst "rationalists".
"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
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All(most) rationalists are atheists, but not all atheists are rationalists.
I think rationalism is kind of like stoicism (both philosophies I like and try to practice, though I don't really "identify" as either a rationalist or a stoic) - the basic outlines are unobjectionable and sensible, and more people would benefit by them, but the more fine-grained you get, the harder it is to be a "true" rationalist/stoic. Nobody can act with pure rationalism or stoicism all the time, and the more seriously you take it the more you become entangled in questions of "what is the real rationalist/stoic answer, anyway?"
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