I think it's a meaningful distinction- most rationalists aren't running murder cults.

throwanem 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

That we know about, I suppose. We didn't know at one point there were any outright rationalist cults, after all, whether involved in sex, murder, both, or otherwise. That is, we didn't know there were subsets of self-identifying "rationalists" so erroneous in their axioms and tendentious in their analysis as to succeed in putting off others.

But a movement, that demonstrates so remarkably elevated rate of generating harmful beliefs in action as this, warrants exactly the sort of increased scrutiny this article vainly strives to deflect. That effort is in itself interesting, as such efforts always are.

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6177c40f 7 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, as a rationalist, I can assure you it's not nearly as sinister a group as you seem to make it out to be, believe it or not. Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults.

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throwanem 7 days ago | parent [-]

> Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults

This isn't the defense of rationalism you seem to imagine it to be.

I don't think the modal rationalist is sinister. I think he's ignorant, misguided, nearly wholly lacking in experience, deeply insecure about it, and overall just excessively resistant to the idea that it is really possible, on any matter of serious import, for his perspective radically to lack merit. Unfortunately, this latter condition proves very reliably also the mode.

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6177c40f 7 days ago | parent [-]

> his perspective radically to lack merit

What perspective would that be?

	▲	throwanem 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		None in particular, as of course you realize, being a fluent reader of this language. It was just a longwinded way of saying rationalists suck at noticing when they're wrong about something because they rarely really know much of anything in the first place. That's why you had to take that scrap of a phrase so entirely out of context, when you went looking for something to try to embarrass me with. Why? Which perspective of yours has you so twitchingly desperate to defend it?

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Viliam1234 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Funny how the comment making a factual correction gets downvoted.

For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)

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throwanem 6 days ago | parent [-]

If it took you this long to see a pattern that anyone with any experience at all can trivially recognize, why should anyone trust you to defend against anything? You are plainly incompetent.

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Viliam1234 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, I am definitely plainly incompetent for not noticing a trivially recognizable pattern...

> This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist."

...that you have denied in another comment in the same thread. I guess that makes two of us plainly incompetent.

	▲	throwanem 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can't even tell what you mean to try to criticize here. Are you saying that because one may tell what the article tried to do and failed, it didn't fail? I can try to answer your point here, but you need to put in the effort of making it make sense, first.