or: “so what are you doing about the skulls?”
I love rationalists. Literally — I married one!
So why don’t I call myself a rationalist? Approximately:
- Not enough “gets things done”
- Analytic rather than iterative mindset
- Overemphasis of individual vs group intelligence
- Lack of warmth, graciousness
- Less ability to connect to
What do I think rationalists should do differently?
- Broadly
- Learn to communicate and form coalitions with people not like yourselves.
- I don’t just mean EA — though definitely repairing some of the EA/rat split stuff would be good, like whatever is up with OpenPhil/Dustin and rationality
- Really, people who are “low decouplers”, people with different values, people who are less intelligent-in-the-way-rationalists-prize
- If you want to take AI safety into the mainstream, then it becomes really important to understand and work with all kinds of folks
- Rationalists have been able to develop their own “stack” — their own news sources, funding sources, coordination mechanisms, physical communities, Lighthaven as a campus.
- It’s one of the closest working examples of a network state, without the pretention; a laudable achievement
- But then you can easily stop getting feedback from the outside world
- Think about what barriers to entry an extremely literate codex imposes on potential contributors; or what kind of skillsets your movement lacks as a result
- “Getting things done”
- Interpersonal charisma
- Communication in other forms (video; animation; memes; tweets)
- Art?
- Music? (I actually like a lot of the rationalist stuff tho)
- Lessons from EA
- For all that you shun EA-style college recruiting — it sure does do something with regards to getting smart ambitious upcoming folks excited by the mission
- Lessons from startups
- Move fast
- Make things
- Lessons from religions
- More regularity (Sunday mass)
- Love everyone, help everyone
- (rationalism by default is selfish and individualistic)
- Lightcone specifically
- Incorporate and run as a for profit. Migrate your impact equity to regular shares of stock. Charge for services (you’re already doing this with Lighthaven, which is pretty good)
- Rescue the Lesswrong offshoots (EA Forum, Alignment Forum, Progress Forum)
- Get off of Slack; build good realtime chat directly into Lesswrong. (I always found it embarrassing that so much discussion about Manifold happened on our Discord instead of on our native platform)
Excesses of truthseeking
- Just because you like a particular way of communicating, does not mean that it is a better expression of truth
- See: Ask vs Guess vs Tell culture, and the virtues of Guess Culture
- To take a tiny example, the rationalist norm of trying to be precise in everyday conversation in response to “how are you?” or “what have you been doing lately?”
- I imagine a straw rationalist as trying to respond with exacting precision, like (TOTALLY MADE UP EXAMPLE) “oh, in the last week my day to day happiness ratings have averaged 5.5/10, which is about 1 point lower than my set point” instead of “fine” but:
- This comes at the cost of succinctness
- This ignores built in societal norms which most of the rest of the population expects you to abide by
- Ignoring the norm in favor of what you see as correct or more “true” is defecting, and perhaps even less truth-conveying, because it is interpreted differently than you intended
Places where I love rationalism
- When it comes to my defense eg on Manifest 2024
- I like that somebody out there cares about truth!
- Maybe rationalism is best relegated to “the truthseeking arm of Society”, with the understanding that it is but one of many philosophies in a pluralistic congregation
See also:
- Rationalism is systematized winning
- Yes, we have noticed all the skulls
- Where are all the successful rationalists?
- Richard Ngo on the importance of truthseeking