Comment by analog31
Comment by analog31 19 hours ago
Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
Comment by analog31 19 hours ago
Every rationalist movement eventually ends up at odds with rational people.
Rationalism, and the people who believe in it and promote it, has the problem that the human mind unavoidably decides to act as the arbiter of what is rational or not. This limits your vision to only that which the mind internally 'agrees with' or not, entrenching hidden biases.
Fundamentally, it's the mind only engaging with the cognitive, and ignoring the limbic. Engaging with the limbic, with the deep, primal parts of the brain, challenges cognitively-held truths and demands you to support these truths from a broader context.
This is why rationalists are more prone to engage with fascist viewpoints, they seek more power for their held beliefs and fascism offers that in spades. You're not thinking about the history of fascist movements and how horrible they all turned out. You're thinking: How can we do it better this time?
Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real, and you need both the rational and the irrational to make reality. Focusing exclusively on rationality is intentionally blinding yourself to messy reality.
I too want to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest case of blatant equivocation sneaking past people.
>> Just like in math, the rational is a subset of the real
That only works if you think Rationality ⊂ Reality the same way ℚ ⊂ ℝ — which is like saying Space-time ⊂ Archery because time flies like an arrow.
Wordplay is not an argument.
And I'd like to highlight this, since it's one of the cleanest cases of everyone in a situation knowing what's being said, and then a rationalist coming along and thinking everyone is misunderstanding it except for him.
Rationalists read poetry like "Compare thee to a summer's day? Pfft, impossible!"
That's an interesting take, but I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
I do agree there's more to human experience than just the cognitive / "system 2" view, but the important aspect of our cognitive facility - aspects that put humans on top of the global food chain - is that we can model and reason about the "limbic", and even though we can merely approximate it in the cognitive space, we've also learned how to work with approximations and uncertainty.
This is to say, if reason seems to justify viewpoints generally known, viscerally and cognitively, to be abhorrent, it typically means one's reasoning about perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum instead of actual human beings, and fails to include the "deep, primal parts of the brain" in their model. That, fortunately, is a correctable mistake.
Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
> I can't see how you can dismiss rationality/rationalism as insufficient to process reality on the basis of "ignoring the limbic", without dismissing all of science and mathematics in the process.
Only a rationalist could make such a statement. I tell you rationalism is only a part of reality, not the whole, and you take that as a dismissal of all of the rational. I have no problems with science and maths, I just don't elevate them to the level of prime importance that rationalists do. I watched the Veritasium video on Cantor and the Axiom of Choice before I saw it on HN, and I follow Dr. Angela Collier on YouTube.
I'm an intuitionist, not a rationalist. I believe in a broad and rich informational diet, and that intuitive understanding is better than reductionist, which is the only kind of understanding rationalists seem to value.
> is that we can model and reason about the "limbic",
We can, and the academic domain that produces is generally called the humanities, and the humanities seem to be almost universally dismissed, even despised, by rationalists. So color me unimpressed when rationalists do this acceptance / dismissal dance regarding them. You don't really care about the humanities, just that we can model and reason about them. You want your rational bent to encompass the irrational, when fundamentally it cannot do that. Yes we can study the humanities. Just not with science or math or any other positivistic approach that would satisfy a rationalist.
And I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's the cognitive that allowed us to dominate. In fact it's the cooperation between the cognitive and the limbic that produces the language that allows us to communicate with each other that gave us the advantage. Without the limbic there's no reason or room to cooperate.
All your viewpoint seeks to do is reduce the real into the rational.
> Just like in math, if you construct a seemingly solid edifice of theorems and proofs, but forget and subsequently violate a critical assumption, all kind of wild conclusions will come out the other end.
Hence Elon Musk's Nazi-esque government takeover.
Everyone likes to use fascist to smear their political opponents, yet I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the "anti-fascists" are any different. They support mass censorship, state propaganda, political violence, forever war, discrimination, debanking, lawfare, lockdowns, and ironically even infringement of bodily autonomy through unconstitutional vaccine mandates.
I hope this "I know you are but what am I" approach to politics falls out of fashion soon. Like listening to children playing cops and robbers.
> whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing?
Just a nit, it's "who" in this case, not "whom," because it is a subject not an object. "Whom" is more often used as "to/with/for whom."
Thanks! English is not my first language, and I still have problem with this particular thing.
(IIRC use of "whom" was never covered in my English classes; I only learned about it from StarGate: SG-1, a show in which one of the main characters had a habit of mocking enemies by correcting their grammar.)
It always falls down because the end-goal of ones "rationalism" always has to be determined by a set of values.
If you want to form a political ideology based on rationality, your very first step will stick you right in the middle of the sticky-icky world of the humanities. 'Hello deontology, my old friend.'
Even definitions there are extremely hazy. "The most good for the most people".
Define "good". Happiness? Economic prosperity? Community? And over what time span?
Define "most". Percentage of people served? Number of people served?
Define "people". Are you counting citizens? Immigrants? Foreigners? Prisoners? People in the future?
You know the joke in the sciences about how everything distills down to mathematics? I would argue that we just as often distill down to philosophy. You have to reckon with a lot of questions which a stats degree can't help you much with.
But then, whom are you dissing? Whom is GP dissing? Because it's really unclear. On the one hand, "rational people" keep their views even as they drift apart from a wider "rationalist movement". On the other hand, it's the rationalist communities - the movement - that's much more likely to actually know something "about the foundations of economics or political science". On the grasping hand, such communities can and do get stuck missing forest for the trees.
But then on the slapping hand, approximately all criticism of rationalism (particularly LessWrong-associated) I've seen on HN and elsewhere, involves either heresay and lies, or just a legion of strawmen like "zomg Roko's basilisk" or GP's own "arguments" like:
> Nobody likes a technocrat, because a technocrat would let a kid who fell down a well die there, since the cost of rescuing them could technically save the lives of 3 others someplace else
It's hard to even address something that's just plain bullshit, so in the end, I'm still leaning towards giving rationalists the benefit of doubt. Strange as some conclusions of some people may sometimes be, they at least try to argue it with reason, and not strawmen and ideological rally cries.
EDIT: and then there's:
> They often re-hash arguments which have been had and settled like 200 years ago
Well, somebody has to. It's important for the same reason reproducibility in science is important.
I'd be wary of assuming any complex argument has been "settled like 200 years ago". When people say this, they just mean "shut up and accept the uninformed, simplistic opinion". In a sense, this is even worse than blindly following religious dogma, as with organized religions, the core dogmas are actually designed by smart people to achieve some purpose (ill-minded or not); cutting people off with "settled like 200 years ago" is just telling them to accept whatever's the cheapest, worst-quality belief currently on sale on the "marketplace of ideas".