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I'm surprised that people are surprised by this, to be honest?
If I think about 'rationalists', I think about people who are really into 'AI safety', who experiment with and use nootropics, who are keen on inventing and trying new life hacks, who are actively interested in reinventing things like relationship models from the ground up, and who for some reason are associated with California and the Bay Area...
Obviously that's a group that are going to be into woo because, well, they're already into woo. They always have been. They're already cousins of traditional hippies, right? They're pro-tech where the older generation of hippies tended to be anti, but you can see the kinship, surely?
I don't know that it's "surprising" per se. But I think that the rationalists would say that nootropics and the things you listed are not woo, so it's just rational to be into them, while they would readily admit that crystals are woo so it's irrational to be into them. In other words, the rationalists are being irrational by their own standards and are susceptible to the same things they claim to not be susceptible to. Everyone, rationalist or not, can agree on these facts.
Sure, but that's exactly the same thing a homeopath or a chiropractor would say. The word 'woo' is pejorative. Nobody uses it of himself or herself. I think the subculture is the interesting part. Whether it's nootropics or the older counter-culture embrace of mind-affecting drugs, or to take substances out of it entirely, the way that both original-flavour-hippies and rationalists have gotten really into meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, and eastern spirituality, I think there's a noticeable qualitative similarity.
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I was always under the impression that a core part of the Rationalist project was rejecting prior societal judgement of things and instead autistically determining effectiveness through experiment and first principles.
I don’t see why “crystals are woo” would be any less thrown-out than “computers aren’t alive” or “polyamorous relationships are bad.” Heck, even just the prior step of “woo stuff is ineffective/bad” would have to be thrown out to start to have any ideological coherence: Frankly I’d be disappointed in any Rationalist project that didn’t address woo topics from a neutral open-minded perspective.
This seems to be true in practice, but plenty on this forum (and I'd put myself in their number) would consider Chesterton's thoughts on fences to be quite rational as well in the general case. There is probably room enough to argue that both can coexist as "rational", but that us humans tend to smuggle in our prior value systems at any opportunity: Left-leaning rationalists (in the Bay Area) find leftism completely rational; right-leaning rationalists (here, I suppose?) find rightism completely rational. I'm not sure either can really claim a monopoly on "rational truth".
Oh I certainly agree with that in practice, but it seemed to me that it was just a sad deviation from the theory, rather than an actual doctrinal goal (to the extent that a loose group of people who frequent certain blogs can be said to have a doctrine). Of course, like any loose set of ideas, each person carries their own personal bundle.
I don’t doubt that everyone smuggled in their own values via intuitions, and I have my own per theory that this is because values are mostly actually just expressions of biologically rooted emotional reactions.
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