A slight controversy about the “rationalist” community has surfaced on the internet recently. Scott Alexander can point you to the appropriate places to bone up on what’s going down, as well as a relatively short apologia for his community.
First, the self-description of the community as “rationalists” is in my opinion a big problem. It’s rather like the aught era attempt to redefine the atheist “community” as “brights”. No one thinks of themselves as a “dim,” and unless you are a little too into your Nietzsche there aren’t that many self-described irrationalists.
I became socially close to many people in the Bay area rationalist community in the late 2000s. Many I still consider friends. I won’t belabor my differences with them in terms of optics and marketing, as well as substantive critiques of the role of group-think in any human community, as well as strong disagreements in relation to inferences made about what is and isn’t “rational” (there was for some time a vogue for polyamory in this subculture, which some justified as the rational position; I was skeptical).
At the end of the day I put less emphasis on reflective analysis in dictating the course of my life at any given moment than self-described rationalists. Reasonable, even rational, people may disagree on these issues.
But I do have to say that you don’t get a good sense of the community from blog posts or media reports. Meeting together in social situations the group dynamic is far different than most other congregations of humans you’ll encounter. The rationalists I know are some of the most open-minded and non-judgmental people you could meet. They are less likely than the average bear to write up screeds on the internet. They entertain alternative hypotheses with the appropriate level of cold-bloodedness, while attempting to work out the implications of their utilitarian ethics to their logical conclusions.
This does not mean that rationalists are not horrible people. They are people, so many are horrible. They are simple less horrible, in my experience. They may not achieve the state of “less wrong,” but in general they achieve the state of less unhinged and less emotive.
Some of this is due to striving toward a particular set of values and community norms. But some of this is I believe because the community attracts a particular personality profile. In Simon Baron Cohen’s classic typology the rationalist community is highly enriched for systemizers. The rationalists entertain ideas which might strike normal people as bizarre, but that’s part of the method to their madness. Because their personality profiles are sharply differentiated from normal distributions many of the social dynamics that any behavioral economic game would find in other test populations might not apply among the rationalists.
Note: I believe rationalists do engage in less “signalling” dynamics than you’d expect, because they’re less keyed in to cues from other humans, including those in their own community.
Supporting polyamory as a rational position is a perfect example of believing that something is rational simply because you’re ignorant of the rational reasons against it. Most of those arguments ought to have been shut down real quick when somebody posted the numbers regarding the Cinderella Effect, or pointing out that swinger couples in the literature are successful because all of those relationships that didn’t work out aren’t included in those studies.
Conservative risk management dictates that you simply use what systems you already know work, and that you carefully test any new systems before implementing them.
I agree with most of this response, but in its heyday LessWrong was a hotbed of signalling. It was very hard to communicate with others without referencing a Sequence post or three. They still attempted to be receptive, but it was possibly harder for them to be such because of the ease with which the core beliefs of the community were expressed as something to rally around. In my opinion, though, these things have gotten better since Scott’s taken up the helm (unwittingly).
We’re perfectly aware of the Cinderella Effect, we just don’t assume that the sole purpose of relationships is to raise kids.
“Conservative risk management dictates that you simply use what systems you already know work, and that you carefully test any new systems before implementing them.”
Except we might disagree with “conservative” risk management.
Non sequitur. Partners uninvolved with parental care can still abuse children. Reducing the number of unrelated people having sex with your parents is a surefire way to make a world with less Cinderella violence.
If you disagree with generally using conservative risk management to make big decisions for large numbers of people, then I have to assume you’re either an idiot, a masochist, or a nihilist.
I was in a secular-humanist group in Texas for a year or so. I drifted away because I’m at heart not a joiner.
My recollection (this was 1998-9) was that the people were very, er, bright and less intolerant than one might think (I was already conservative, I wasn’t made unwelcome), but societally dysfunctional. Several were “on the spectrum”.
One factor that might have helped, oddly: few women. I saw none of that primate-level competition which I saw in, say, college. There was no point signalling for virtue or for being the Better Atheist or for anything else. You did your thing and you contributed, and that was good enough.
Atheist chatrooms online, now… THOSE can get rough. There the problem is that the text scrolls by so fast you have to use extreme language to get noticed.
I want to point out that people often conflate the meat-space Berkeley-centered rationalist community with the distributed online community.
Scott Alexander lives in Michigan. Robin Hanson lives in Virginia. There are LessWrong meetups from Slovakia to Japan. In NYC, there are enough rationalists for weekly meetups about LW-related literature and research, but we’re not part of the Bay Area dynamic of polyamory, group houses, and the concomitant drama. The latter drama might be an unavoidable consequence of a situation where everyone’s coworkers, friends, roommates and lovers all come from the same community (and rationalists probably handle it with better grace than most).
In any case, we are united mostly by shared interests and epistemology-related community norms. When people point to something that happens in Berkeley as evidence of rationalists being a weird cult, the rest of us give a chuckle.