Once you decide that you believe what you believe because you are very smart and almost always believe true things, and the things you believe just happen to be the true ones (I am being unfair but I think this is the psychological effect of this so-called rationalism) it's not a big leap to: everything I have to say is worth hearing.
> So why, then, does truth sometimes engender hatred? Why does the servant of God come to be an enemy of those who want a happy life, even though true happiness is joy in the truth? The reason must be this: Our love of truth is such that when we love something that’s not the truth, we pretend to ourselves that we we love is the truth. Then, because we hate to be proved wrong, we’re unwilling to be convinced that we’ve deceived ourselves. In this way, then, people hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love more than the truth. They love truth when it shines warmly on them, and hate it when it rebukes them.
It’s a feeling that I got from reading his stuff over the years. Asking the AI just now comes up with a number of examples where he himself admitted to it. I also found him increasingly disingenuous.
Can this truly be the reason? Aren't there infinitly many non-verbose writers out there who believe themselves to be correct just as much?
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
I always get the impression that they correlate length and correctness. As if the Perfect Best Answer to some question is an infinitely long essay that resembles someone’s rambling mind obsessing over a particular topic, forever.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Length is no substitute for substance. However, reality, as they say, has an surprising amount of detail. That means if someones goal is to adequately represent it you will not be able to do so in a engaging, polemic one-liner that puts everything neatly into a box.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
The linked post points out that writing from the rationality community often spends excess time on insubstantial parts of an argument, which can actually distract focus from the truly essential reasoning and doesn't help the reader. I've read a lot from LessWrong/rationality adjacent community and agree with that observation.
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Yeah sure. Writing is a way of structuring your thinking. Now whether you need to air that out to the public is a question of character. I tend to do 90% of writing purely for myself and need to force myself to write a blog post, for others that may differ.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.
Oh God, that's why pastors keep giving long-winded sermons that are claim after claim after claim and without any argumentative structure (and divine inspiration stands in for self-belief in one's own intelligence)
Such a great description of Rationalism: "I am very smart and I made up a methodology that is infallible therefore..."
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
I think their self-criticism is an act, a sham to make their arguments look stronger. They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors, especially if they come from outside the rationalist community.
It's like this:
I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.
Ask any cryptographer how well that works.
This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.
Yeah but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves? Are they open to criticism they didn't come up with themselves?
I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.
Correct. They basically just want intelligence to determine social ranking in society.
Whether society eats the people at the bottom or not doesn't matter to them, they just want to be at the top.
If AI is at the top then they will be thrown into the hypothetical meat grinder [0] they thought they were safe from. So AI is the devil to them because it breaks their ideology at its core.
[0] Is it hypothetical if a rationalist is scared of it?
I think a lot of people are tempted to define the people they disagree with as idiots. Not all of them write down their thoughts at length. Both the verbosity and the edgelordery seem to be part of the culture of that community rather than inherent consequences. I think the sequences and HPMOR started or popularised a sort of norm that length is indicative of serious thought.
When I was younger I kinda liked edgy topics and stances for the sake of being edgy. I can easily see how self identified rationalist people that want e.g. racial superiority to be true persuade them self into believing that by looking at economical outcomes and crime statistics handwaiving away historical circumstances and the pressure on the bottom rungs of society which are in the bottom be design.
Their leaning towards fascism is some sort of reductionism for these people I think. In essence political violence make the perpetrators more powerful than if they were nice playing liberals given the same popular support. Thus fuscism. Q.E.D.
Way too little focus on second or third order effects.
Rightwing radicals that 10 to 30 years ago would say they are libertarians are now fascists instead. It is really strange to witness. I think there is a lack of focus on second or third order effects. It is just problem and superficial cause. How hard can it be, just do it, etc.
On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
I think rationalism might be one of those things where those self identifying and those practicing might only be slightly intersecting.
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
> You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
Right, one could make that statement. It would be silly, but they could make it. I think most people who consider themselves good at basketball are probably better than average at basketball.
> That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Is the notion that someone who's not good at basketball can't recognize a good basketball player?
I actually think my metaphor is also true. Based upon what I have observed in real life it seems to hold up.
I should note that you changed the statement from say to consider themselves. It is entirely possible (and rather frequent) for people who do not consider themselves good at basketball to say that they are. People who actually are good at basketball quite often do not feel the need to say so, because it is apparent when they play.
I can change "consider themselves to be rationalists" to "say they are good at basketball" because that is just a change of premise. It leaves the structure the same.
This unfortunately doesn’t help if it isn’t paired with withholding judgement in the face of insufficient evidence, but rationalists don’t do that. They just pick a model they like and continue, and the burden of scrutinizing that model is on others.
Making rational decisions means picking the most responsible option given imperfect information. It doesn't mean delaying decisions until you have perfect information because that point never comes.
What's sufficient information is also a huge part of the debate. See: should we start worrying about AI safety or not yet?
Opinions based on insufficient information help immensely in determining whether we have sufficient information, and also raise awareness of important topics that we need more information on. These blog posts serve a very important role in the information exchange ecosystem and the whole world would be worse off if all these people held off until they're 99% certain. Nobody would be talking about climate change, about economy, about quantum gravity, about ancient civilizations, about prehistoric animal species, etc. etc. and so on.
Using the easy to defend claim (acting without perfect information is necessary) to defend a much broader one (my judgement is rational and justified based on the information I have) is a classical motte and bailey fallacy.
People in the rationalist community don’t see it, because ironically they’re not rational enough. But they use the language and essay format to make it seem like they are.
Rationalists seem to believe that their ability to convince themselves of anything given enough evidence is a sign of intelligence.
It's not. It's a sign of being disconnected from yourself and your true values. There is a great amount of wisdom and intelligence in properly honed intuition.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
Rationalisation is the default mode of operation for humans. Believe first; find evidence to justify it. That's what everyone is doing. Not that self proclaimed rationalists would be free of that. But pretty unfair characterization for a movement whose key goal is to that as little as possible.
The heart of science is not doing this but checking your reason against reality constantly.
It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.
Their stated key goal is avoiding it, sure. But in practice?
My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".
Not sure - perhaps true for an oversocialized subset or people who try to wield and gather social influence.
Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.
Totally agree, it's like their singular defining characteristic.
It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.
Pretty unfair of you to conflate a movement's stated goals with its behavior when the comment that you are replying to is very obviously talking about the latter. So rationalist!
A big part is that the rationalist community has little respect for traditional philosophical arguments. Consequently they don’t really understand how to make an argument, in the sense of a formal logical framework that can be summarized and critiqued.
Instead they seem to take one premise and just run with it, and tens of thousands of words later, they think they’ve made some profound point.
I’d say that 99% of the rationalist essays I’ve read wouldn’t be given passing grades in an academic philosophy class on the topic.
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
>Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work
My reading is the inability to understand serves only as an educational device for the reader. After all, at the end of the article the only point of contention is whether or not the objective truth exists. Is your point that the postmodern types don't claim that it doesn't? Or that they're an easy target used to later claim victory against a larger group?
Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.
On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.
I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp.
It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barneshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
> It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research
Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.
Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.
Well for one the main rationalist figure head argued with a straight face on how many people should be saved from getting dust in their eyes to justify torturing a person.
You've misunderstood the scare quotes. I meant the community's perception of "Bayesian thinking", rather than Bayesian inference itself. Calling your reasoning Bayesian doesn't establish that it is, much as {{person of particular religion}} calling themselves moral doesn't establish their morality.
Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
I was being the term academic philosophy to mean the entirety of historical and contemporary thought, not specifically just papers published recently.
That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
I also really don’t think you can just hand wave away the entire history of ideas with vague statements like “from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.”
This attitude is exactly why rationalism is a goofy internet thing and not an actual intellectual movement.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and IME the idea that papers published in leading analytic journals are obscure on purpose is nonsense. There is no tolerance for the kind of handwavy arrogance you’ll find in “internet thought” on blogs and social media.
>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The LW/rationalist space, and other spheres adjacent to it, have a disdain for traditional philosophy, but have spent very little time engaging with that philosophy and giving sufficient reasons as to why it’s not important, or not even worth engaging with.
> Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
I’m not arguing against the average holder of the idea.
I’m saying that the argument that “academic philosophy is verbose and obscure on purpose” isn’t a good argument, and is most often repeated by people with little knowledge of the field, so often that it’s become something of a culture war trope. At the very least it’s a well-known quality of LW and similar spaces.
As in the comments above, there is often no actual paper, no argument, just vague assertions and a couple random name drops, as if that’s an argument.
Provide a counter-example where you restate it in less-verbose language without losing critical nuance.
This would, however, typically require developing expertise in a field, and then actually reading and understanding the thing being accused of being obtuse and verbose.
If you can demonstrate that you can do that for any arbitrary paper in a field, then sure, you'll convince me that its practitioners are long-winded gasbags.
You haven’t produced any summary of an argument, or even a real link to one justifying the claim that all academic philosophy is obscure on purpose, in any of your comments.
Instead you’ve linked to a blog post about AI and academic publishing; and a paper from 15 years ago that says social sciences and humanities are plagued by a problem with obscurity.
This isn’t how actual philosophical debate works. But it’s a perfect example of how LW is not a serious intellectual community.
I have made an observation and allowed the intellectual heavyweights persuade much better those who observe otherwise. Seems quite close to what academics call a "citation".
This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.
I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.
You mean flawed philosophical arguments? I find antiscientist arguments usually flawed, like EAAN and knowability paradox. You can say they are written by preachers so are no true philosophy? Conversely you can say they are high quality, because they are falsifiable.
I'm not a specialist in either, though I know of Plantinga and don't dismiss him as a preacher. From what I was able to find, there's engagement on this topic with back and forth, so I'm not sure it's settled. I'm not sure how much LW posts are discussed by an out-group.
On knowability, the SEP says: "There is no consensus about whether and where the proof goes wrong", so I'm not sure this is a good example of a trivial issue either.
And I wasn't claiming philosophy contains no flawed arguments, but dismissing the entire corpus rather than peacemeal attack seems reactionary rather than reformative.
> Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy.
They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.
But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.
The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.
I also studied philosophy.
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¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.
This is basically a dunk piece. Scott’s and gwern’s posts are often long because they contain arguments, which ironically the author does not use, other to point to one gwern post. He says that rationalists substitute thoroughness for verbosity when gwern’s post does the exact opposite!
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
I think Scott in particular just really enjoys writing. He is very articulate and obviously just brimming with clever connections and turns of phrase. And he can generate a lot of words very easily.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
What the author here misses is that the verbosity is often a signal of work done.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
Also literally the post he links to for "its bad actually" is a blog about how it's great and not very addictive and just has some tweets from people who apparently didn't pay attention to the nicotine gum/patch/pouch recommendation in gwern's post and instead started using various forms of tobacco. Very sloppy all around.
Agree with the author. Most rationalist material I've tried to read it's incredibly lengthy and frequently boring. It's also true that they are using verbosity and a certain academic style to hide the lack of precision and correctness. They are prolific writers, but not great.
It reminds me a bit of elaborate theological arguments that build up in denominational seminaries. The authors just have an obsessive compulsion to catalogue and resolve every minute detail, details that only really matter if you've already accepted many other dubious and compounding premises. IE, the articles are really for existing converts.
Let's start with the premise that I'm not okay. So what am I going to do about that? Well I could say woe is me. Where the bloody hell is that going to get me? Now let's presuppose that I am destined to—
He manages to bring every discussion back to: how it's good to believe literally in religious fairy tales, tidying your room, only eating meat, no one else apart from him should decide the meaning of words, and some fever dream he had about lobsters.
People are quite right criticise him. However he did help me (indirectly) when he was on first on Joe Rogan years ago and was talking about addiction. It got me seriously thinking about quitting drink.
I wish he kept to talking more about those subjects and the Bible as I found that much more interesting.
Peterson fallen in a profoundly sad, but also illuminating, way. He obviously had a bit of NPD even from the start, which is true of virtually every public figure. The crack widened and finally split with the help of powerful drugs - fame, money, and Xanax, with a side of audience capture. He quickly went from "liberal Canadian rationalist with the gumption to push back against the left on principle" to just another unthinking right-wing parrot. His view of strength hurt him here, because he was in a crucible that broke him and yet he clearly could not admit it. Contrast him with someone like Sam Harris who, IMO, has been in the crucible for longer but who is far less pugnacious and has managed to maintain his sanity and his nuanced principles despite the forces that want bimodal commentary only.
Sam Harris is not a good example. Sam Harris used to go on hour long crash outs about Trump on his podcast. It became impossible to listen to. I've spoken to people both online and offline who have said that they stopped listening to him because it became unbearable.
Then there is this infamous quote in 2022.
> "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement – I would not have cared."
I understand he is being hyperbolic, but honestly it wasn't that obvious though, because the aforementioned crash outs. He also allowed everyone to be quote mine him. It is an unforced error.
Generally I find Sam Harris tbh to be not particularly that interesting anyway. He gets a lot of mileage (like a lot of these personalities) from his elocution. He makes him sound insightful than he really is.
Well I guess we can agree to disagree because I think there's a lot about Trump to crash out about. It's difficult to understand how someone who so obviously a villain is so popular. It's disorienting and frustrating, like walking out of Star wars hearing people praise Darth Vader for how wonderful he was and how nasty Luke was to him. How The empire is a staple job Creator and the rebel alliance a bunch of filthy blooded miscreants who don't appreciate what they have...
If we are making Star Wars references. The whole lore of Sidious is how he and Plagueis manipulated various parties in the galaxy to gain power. In the story itself it explains how this can happen. The Jedi weren't really the good guys. They were an ossified monastic order that had lost its way.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both rival elites vying for power to enrich themselves and their circle via the apparatus of the Republican and Democratic parties. They are both reprehensible, for different reasons. Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US (the Republicans didn't want him running for the party). There are no good guys here. They were both shit.
The crash out was due to the fact Sam Harris couldn't wrap his head around the fact that people were fed up of public figures that are similar to himself. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing. He appeared to do very little introspection on the matter. His whole brand is him trying to rationally understand what's happening, and he did the exact opposite.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, is another left-wing intellectual that did understand the sentiment and has made an effort to understand people he deeply disagrees with. Guess whose ideas are more relevant currently? It isn't Harris; Harris is irrelevant these days.
> Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
I don't understand why people like yourself come up with this stuff. There are loads of clips from 2016 where people were saying this. It's 10 years later, and I am still having conversations where we are denying the reality of what happened; it is bizarre.
> Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
Project 2025 is a thing from the Heritage Foundation and wasn't a thing back in 2016, because it was published in 2023. You are just repeating stuff you've heard on the TV/YouTube.
The Heritage Foundation has been moving towards Paleo-conservatism since about 2021. The Paleo-cons were ejected/rejected from the Republican Party in the Buckley days.
I was talking about the 2016 campaign. Back in 2016 (not 2024), the Republican establishment didn't want him there. Pretending otherwise is asinine.
> The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
People liked Trump because he's brash and loud and has an attractive wife who used to be a model. He has a ridiculous hairstyle. He flew in on a massive jet that has his name on the side of it.
He also trolled/manipulated the media constantly, which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
I am English, I live in the UK. My mates and I would get some beers and watch the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump debates late at night to see the shit show. It was really funny. "What is old Donald going to say this time?!".
I understand that doesn't appeal to everyone, but a lot of people like this stuff. I won't lie, I kind of liked it as well at the time.
Compare that to someone like Jeb Bush or even his opponents, Hillary Clinton; there was no momentum, no hype.
Malcolm McLaren is quoted as saying, "Pro-wrestling is real, and politics is fake." You need to keep that in mind when watching any political coverage.
> Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
No, they didn't. What people like is that he was talking about stuff they cared about and they believed he was speaking for them.
It is 10 years later, and people like yourself are still misstating what people were saying and have done no introspection.
Trump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
You are doing exactly what many people were criticising Sam Harris for. I was fed up of it back in 2017, and you and Sam haven't learnt anything.
It is one of the reasons why I don't bother talking to people about stuff like this, because you can't look past the surface, and you make no attempt to understand what happened.
I spent quite a lot of time reading and interactimg with conservatives and republicans. I am from that environment.
Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
> which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
> rump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
Dissapointingly, I got the exact response I thought I would.
> I spent quite a lot of time reading and interactimg with conservatives and republicans. I am from that environment.
I don't believe you. I am not conservative; I am not American, and I can tell you haven't.
> Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
Why? Because you say so? I don't even understand how it is "self serving bullshit". People were fed up with run-of-the-mill politics. Even on the left wing you had many people that were radical (that have become less so over time) entering into politics around that time.
I also must have imagined reading all the comments and seeing all those videos that people posted around that time, specifically on the theme that they were voting for Trump because they believe he was something different.
I remember listening to many hours of people just talking in Skype, Google Hangouts and similar places at the time. I get really annoyed when people try to gaslight me about events that I was paying a lot of attention to at the time.
> That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
I think it is funny to get CNN to broadcast your rally for you based on deception, because CNN wanted him to something racist and he didn't. He trolled them because they are predictable.
> Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
Apparently you can read minds now. How do you know? I really doubt anyone said, "I know Trump is an evil man, but I am going to vote for him," or something to that effect. If you claim you have. You are lying.
> There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
I am not. The fact that you can't recognise that because I have take on Trump that is sympathetic to MAGA / Trump supporters is ridiculous.
Most Trumps aren't far-right either. You say you listen to Republicans and Conservatives, but you clearly aren't if you are claiming that.
I think, TBH, you are lying to me. So I don't want to talk any further. Go away.
I cancelled my subscription. Harris would always get lost in internet wars and definitely spent too much time reading idiots tweets and getting angry over them.
Sure, JD Vance is a cretin and Trump is vile. Can we please go back to intellectually interesting pursuits?
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
When I open a general article and it starts with things like:
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
It's all about understanding the medium. The Economist makes a wide-ranging, newsstand magazine that isn't too far different of a medium than like a weekend Financial Times paper. I think blogs, or free-ish or frequently publishing substances, naturally slot into that kind of medium where you want to pack the most info and analysis into a deftly concise format.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
"The idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them"
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
Slate Star Codex's review of The Secret of Our Success, arguing specifically in favor of strong Chesterton's Fences, was voted #5 in the 2019 Best of LessWrong review. SSC's review of Seeing Like a State, presenting a similar argument and directly naming Chesterton, was a notable 2017 hit. "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" also argues in favor of maintaining traditional bright lines, hit 700 karma on LW, and is included in the "Best Essays of LessWrong" collection. "Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking" is a 2019 hit following these.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
I didn't intend to fully contradict what you said, but to make a stronger case, and address similar remarks by others--you made the best comment along those lines, regardless of your balance and nuance.
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
The list of counter examples is some of the most popular and well-received posts in the rationalist community which are actually in favour of tradition having value.
"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.
There is also value in the abstract sense, meaning tradition can have value for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
I guess maybe, but it's not intrinsically linked to the event. Like maybe Christmas would be useless if only I celebrated it, but it has a purpose if lots of people celebrate it. Also Christmas is probably not a good example but you get the idea.
Not that FGTM is comparable, but Rationalism really doesn't do as good a job as it believes it does of explaining why people end up believing ridiculous, harmful things.
An effective form of rationalism would be very good at preventing and reversing irrational and harmful beliefs.
There is zero evidence that the Rationalists have done that.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
I've seen this argument before but I don't think I understand it.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.
The verbosity and ability to rationalize let's you come up with reasons which makes sense to your in-group quickly, even if it isn't often grounded in reality. They're quicker to rationalize than understand.
I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.
> It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
You need a combination of both openness and intelligence to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. We don't need to debate whether or not I'm secretly a dolphin.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
A bad idea that is bad on its face is generally benign. Flat earthers have no political or institutional power.
There is more insidious kind of bad idea, like anti-vax philosophy. With these ideas, the layperson doesn't have direct access to comprehensive evidence, the necessary domain complexity exceeds common understanding, human tendency toward suspicious works against you, simple barometers like artificial=bad are useless or harmful, and evidence that seems to support them exists at the margin.
It should be clear that mass social media is causing these bad ideas to proliferate. On the other hard, trying to shut these ideas down through institutional or communal censorship seems to just give them a shot in the arm. Willingness to engage with their proponents shouldn't be seen as tacit support.
Here are your points. None of them are "specific" points.
"I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas" > "People believe bad things, and I don't like that people engage with them."
"It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate" > "The people who engage with them must also believe the bad things too."
"If someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them." > A nonsensical argument to make about twitter which has a character limit.
I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
Things survive for no good reason. It is very common in evolution.
For example, our eyes are wired the wrong way, that is, the optic nerve goes in front of the retina, causing a blind spot and other issues. From a design perspective, it is really stupid and there is no "good" reason why we are like this, it would be like making a monitor with the connectors in front of the display. Octopus eyes are wired the correct way and it works better.
Eyes have evolved like this out of random chance, as an imperfect but functional solution, and we are too advanced for evolution mechanisms to fix the problem now.
And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.
It usually does because other people are also intelligent beings that are usually trying to have a good life and succeed in whatever area they're pursuing. Whatever field it is - earning money, becoming athletic, becoming a musician, becoming a good cook, becoming a good writer or public speaker - there are uncountably many people with a strong desire to succeed in that area and a subset of those that have dedicated their lifes to it.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
Of course there is tremendous value in many traditions. However, when the world is changing quickly as it is today, it is also very important to check in frequently with reality, to face facts, as it were.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.
Yeah. It's titled "a love song to nicotine" and 80+% of it is about the benefits of nicotine with a claim that "sublingual nicotine’s addictive potential feels low", but TFA links to the tacked-on twitter screenshots at the end. Not the point, but it does make one wonder. Though, to be fair, I only realised that the main body of the article existed when I accidentally scrolled back up "too far". Perhaps the author of TFA received the exact same link and made the same mistake as I initially did.
Dataset of one, but I am struggling to quit sublingual nicotine after using it to quit vaping, which I used to quit smoking. Nicotine in any form is intensely moreish in my view.
It’s not a dataset of one (you’re not alone!), there is a huge corpus of data and nicotine is one of the most addicting substances known to humans.
I cringe reading anyone saying “nicotine is great”—because I’ve been there too and it’s literally one of the most devilish things ever.
It’s absolutely addictive, anyone who says otherwise is suspect
What I take issue with is the original sentence saying it’s “bad for you”, I was expecting new science showing that it’s, well, bad for you rather than “just” addictive
Well, it becomes bad for you if you start needing to take so much of it that the other stimulant effects start causing problems, like poor sleep. Most addictive substances have this potential, since "the dose makes the poison". But the same dose forever rarely satisfies cravings forever.
“Just nicotine”/nicotine salts can elevate blood pressure and heart rate which can be very dangerous for some people and long-term bad if not resolved. But by far tobacco smoking is the most physically dangerous which is obviously not the same as “just nicotine”.
Not studies: Somewhat famously Jessica Simpson got accidentally addicted to nicorette[1]. I heard it as a question in NPR “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” (radio-quiz game show) and it ended up being true.
I’ve known many people who used chewing tobacco and were not smokers.
It is pretty funny that the premise of the article is "silly rationalist bloggers, with their long arguments, links to studies, evidence, debate" and then the "alternative" to that being presented is "here's a link to 4 tweets"
My point is that people, lacking common sense, got themselves addicted to nicotine after reading this blog post. I'm not trying to refute the science here, which would be both far longer of an endeavor and not what my blog post is about.
When I think of rationalist blog posts, I think LessWrong and ACX. There is probably more to know. Across 46,000 posts on LW the average word length is 1,300 words as of May 2026. That doesn't seem too bad.
Regarding the varying degree of quality I wanted to note that this is a public forum where anyone is allowed to create an account and post public articles. Anyone is allowed to call themselves a "rationalist" if they want to. I wonder if most who read articles there and post occasionally do label themselves though. I know some who don't.
Much longer I'm sure, but that's a single author with occasional guest posts. The guest posts are mostly thorough book reviews AFAIK at the moment.
Personally I think the length is often justified by the attention to detail but I must admit I only read some of the classics and a few recent posts when they caught my interest. I even scroll past certain paragraphs if I'm uninterested but I don't mind then being there.
It's also such a mix of things over there. What OP mentioned in particular looked to me like original investigative journalism and those kind of undertakings often enough result in whole books.
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
This is a particularly weird example. The median post in the "sequences" is less than 1000 words long. The sequences are mostly a long series of individually very short blogposts.
One of the things the Bible does particularly well is express ideas succinctly. Yes I know you can pull out exceptions but classically this was interpreted as itself having significance.
Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)
The Bible is fundamentally a collection of different works. Within those works, I generally agree that the ideas are fairly succinct. But because there are multiple documents in the Bible which cover roughly the same events, it kind of necessarily isn’t succinct as a single cohesive document.
In other words, if you rewrote the Bible as a single document, yeah, it’d be like 10% as long. But that isn’t how it was made.
I’m guessing you haven’t read it in Hebrew because the Hebrew is pretty succinct.
As for meandering, the narrative follows people who travel around to different places so I don’t know what you mean. The canon of the Bible doesn’t arrange all the books chronologically. You can read them in chronological order if you want.
It’s real. The excessive length is one of several things that serves as a filter. Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end. It even includes completely unnecessary uncomfortable parts like the rape threat sequence which further filter out all but the true believers.
The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.
Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.
> Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end.
Got through the end, not a believer in anything. Not only your statement is wrong (because most absolute statements are) even the weakened statement of most who finished are believers is likely wrong because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
> The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual.
No, Brockton's Celestial Forge for example, a true masterpiece in excessive verbosity and meandering writing which makes The Silmarillion look like a riveting and concise short novel.
Yeah, it also suffers from the over-powered protagonist trope found in a lot of fanfics. It has good elements (of what I've read thus far). I think the story could have been better if it focused on a few crossovers and technologies instead of going "here's a completely unrelated power/ability from a new setting", but the premise (earning rewards for writing that result in random abilities from different franchises) doesn't really lend itself to that.
Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.
A fanfiction where the author gives the main character good boy points for writing more words is kind of the extreme end of this, though. Web serials and fanfiction tend to be overly verbose and meandering, and the Methods of Rationality is very much on the less verbose side of them, but by the standards of traditionally published fantasy and sci-fi it is wordslop.
Another PoV - it was just one weird-premises HP fanfic, in a world containing literally millions of weird-premise HP fanfics. If you felt that your only options with it were (1) read every word, in order, and (2) stop reading it entirely - that is your reading style, and your choice. Other folks may chose to peek at the ending first, skip over the parts they don't like, go back later to read one of the dreary & long-winded part that they realized was plot-relevant, or whatever. They may skip back and forth between reading HPMOR and reading some steamy superhero fanfic with a Batman/Spiderman romantic pairing - that is set on a jungle-style Venus, in the 1890's.
No. My exposure to HPMOR was a very long time ago from an eccentric coworker and his friends who tried to get me to read it. I curiously read a little bit and couldn’t believe people were taking it seriously.
Then I Googled it and found lively discussions from rationalists bending over backward to defend the part of HPMOR where Draco says he’s going to rape someone, and noped right out of that entire subgenre of the internet for years.
I do think it’s fascinating how the rationalists are so unwilling to accept that people may not resonate with their material that everyone who disagrees is assumed to be part of an ideological outgroup with bad intentions. Sneer Club is a tiny subreddit that appears basically inactive?
Why would you presume that the only way for someone to dislike HPMOR is to be indoctrinated by a tiny subreddit instead of having their own opinion? I suppose it tracks that rationalists would view ideologies as being sourced from groups and communities and look for group membership to assign someone’s opinion to, rather than accepting that someone might be able to form their own independent opinions.
You go far further than "to dislike HPMOR". You make sweeping generalizations about the readers. "Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too."
You either dedicated quite a lot of effort to somehow get this statistic (unlikely), or make things up, or acquired the attitude from a place that was quite active at the time.
I felt I could make a single guess about a single person.
As a perseverer, I can confirm it was a waste of time and, functionally, a poorly-written demonstrative exercise on the abuse of rhetoric to disabuse others of their beliefs, dignity and agency. Imagine my surprise when I found out about the cult stuff.
Should've said "'disabuse'" but even without its still kinda my point: I don't think it's right to aggressively pursue and dismantle others worldviews if they're doing ok, even if they're a bit wrong. Functionally you're just chipping at their morale and replacing their shit with your only slightly less wrong shit anyway, so it's ultimately more about coercion and control.
I know nothing about Yudkowsky, I think I read like 10 of his words in total over the course of my life. I was commenting on the general principle of aggressively dismantling every worldview all the time. I think it isn't just a good thing to do, it's the only way to arrive at a worldview that actually holds together.
If you meant Yudkowsky and co. are doing the aggressive dismantling wrong, or aren't dismantling their own views aggressively enough - that's fair, I have zero knowledge on the subject and would love to hear more. But if you mean that aggressive dismantling is wrong in and of itself, I think it's totally fair to bring Socrates and Rousseau into the discussion.
Think of it more like: you walk up to someone leaving a church and "socratically dismantle" their worldview by listing their thinking errors. If you actually manage to, you then go and inject your own ideas as to "how it all really works". If they listen to you and now need you for counsel, are they better off?
The socratic dialogues and enlightenment debates are generally taken up by engaged participants (else the dialogues would be quite short eh?) and aim at the idea of revealing truth through questions, or tackling fundamentally interesting ideas.
The dialogues in HPMOR are most often "you're so, so wrong because your mind is defective and clouded by this list of 30 erroneous thinking patterns. Let me elaborate for 10 minutes about why you're a blind fool and I'm a genius who sees the truth".
The pattern is very different and I think characterising what's done in HPMOR, and what's in greek or enlightenment philosophy is a bad idea.
There are good rationalist writers but Yudkowsky is not the one to look at.
Yudkowsky doesn't stand at your place of worship waiting for you to come out. You have to actively reach out, look him up and open his posts to see a single word of what he's saying. At that point, he's the host and you're the guest; if you came to him to read his posts, it's not a fair complaint that you're exposed to his opinions, even if his opinions are critical your own opinions. It's more akin to being a Jehovah's witness, knocking on an atheist's door, asking them to talk about Jesus, and being mad when they say the Gospel was made up. It would be very rude to say at a church, but they're not at a church, they're at his home.
I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky aims at revealing truth through questions and tackling interesting ideas too, at least in his head. Maybe his questions are wrong or his idea of interesting is wrong, and that would be a valid criticism, but it's a completely different argument than that he shouldn't be asking any questions in the first place.
As far as I know, HPMOR is meant to be a parody, not a serious discourse. It's unfair to judge it like a serious discourse. His blog posts, sure, we should judge them by the serious standards, because AFAIK they're absolutely serious.
I read it for a while, when it first got published. It started very strong (first several chapters), then was weird and refularly was giving me vibes of Atlas Shrugged.
Then author got his diva moment, at least this is how I remember it. He constructed some impossible to solve situation and had tantrum that if readers won’t give answer how one of protagonists will solve it, author will stop writing the book. I think it had even time limit for readers.
After that I dropped the book and never returned to it.
That's correct. Harry Potter fanfic is a huge part of the rationalist movement, the Zizians, and more. Behind the Bastards' episodes on the Zizians do a fairly well-cited dive into it.
Personally, it’s my favorite book and I consider it better than the original series (although the original series is a hard prerequisite).
However, I wouldn’t call it “long” in the same way that I wouldn’t call The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations long. Serialized stories are just naturally longer because readers want a sizable chunk every week/month, regardless of that inflating the total size or not.
I have not read nor heard of this, but umm, its fanfic. People write fanfic because they enjoy the world of the story and want more of it. Why would it be a surprise that a fanfic is overly long and verbose? I'd assume that just goes with the territory.
I'd be interested to see some evidence that it's "considered a foundational text" or is treated in anything like the way that observant Jews treat the Torah.
As one who has lurked in Rationalist corners of the web and learned useful things there without ever really buying in, I can confirm it really is treated rather like a holy text.
I've seen Rationalists defend it against very fair and accurate criticisms (see this whole thread for some of those), completely failing to recognize the complaints and objections are often legitimate.
I believe I've seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the Rationalist community.
It's not uncommon to see people quote it in varying capacities - as a reminder of what "good rationality" looks like, as a cultural shibboleth, as a criticism of an idea they disagree with, and more. As an ex-evangelical who's read the Protestant Bible well over five times, this behavioral pattern looks very, very familiar.
I'm not going to spend the hours digging to find actual evidence I'm correct, and it's possible I'm being unfair and misremembering. I'm just a guy on the Internet - don't take this as anything other than "Here's my recollection. Take it for what it's worth."
The label of "Torah" did not strike me as wrong, though.
I've definitely seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the rationalist community, but that's very different from treating it as a holy text.
The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.
I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.
It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".
Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic.
In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this.
You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
It isn’t really helping beat the allegations here that multiple people are trying to disprove the author’s argument with crappy math. Ok, how many of those posts are Grand Thoughts like the author is actually talking about and what is the average length of those? How about the median? Are there a bunch of “Decided to cut my hair today” tweet style posts mixed in with the Thousand and One Commandments?
I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
> I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
>I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
In Scott Alexander's case, it's because he's into ideas (e.g., eugenics) that most people find reprehensible, so he has to couch them in a lot of bullshit to make them more palatable, and to give himself some credibility.
That link is unlikely to be an unbiased accounting.
Speaking of long-winded rationalist blog posts, the evidence for that claim is this long, detailed, full-of-receipts accounting of David Gerard's use of RationalWiki (though mostly Wikipedia) to push his personal agenda in subtle ways while scrupulously following the rules to avoid being caught at it:
IME they're usually the first thing you see when you get to the comments, so the really long essays are possibly a way to bore people into not getting to the comment section.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start or broadening their philosophical background beyond the collection of texts popular within their subculture.
Personally i think the world would be a better place if more of us added nuance to our arguments.
The problem part in that quote is “rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start”, not that they’re including nuance. Nuance can be a value add or it can be a distraction. It is not by itself virtuous.
The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.
The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.
Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
I don't know, I think rationalist bloggers tend to love arguing, and if you identified some assumption that they didn't address they'd just as happily write 50,000 words on that instead. :-)
I think he just used nuance as a polite way to say meandering.
Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.
Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.
To a degree I think it comes with the rational approach. If you want to be a rationalist, you need to consider many perspectives, and somehow bring in the nuance of as many of them as possible instead of ignoring the parts that don't fit your narrative. It's very easy to be brief with one-sided takes, but nuance is boring and lengthy. That of course doesn't mean that the authors conclusions and arguments will be correct in the end.
While I agree with the author’s main argument, it seems weird to single out a blog post (the one from Scott Alexander) whose title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know” as being too long. I mean of course it is! It’s right there in the title!
That blog post is explicitly targeted at people who are looking for a nice calm evening of reading about a super weird “way out there” subject. It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
It’s a bit like complaining that the “1 pound hangover beater” hamburger at your local grease diner has too many calories.
> title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
This would be a fair complaint if it couldn’t also serve as a valid subtitle to the entire blog itself and not just a post. Admitting it in the title does not undermine the OP’s point about trying to obscure a poorly-framed argument.
My take from the OP was almost immediately, “Oh yeah, they never read Aquinas, et al”. Clearly that too comes from a fixed viewpoint, my particular Western Classics-style education delivered via US Catholic schools in the ‘80s, but I think there is a lot more honesty in any of old Tommy’s Proofs of God. You may agree or disagree with them, but pretty much anyone without any particular background or prior reading can immediately engage with them whereas the rationalists are doing all this navel gazing, or possibly glazing, around their feeling to make it so you cannot disagree because it’s set up to be a game of manners rather (have you read my other source I cited? How can you say that without reading this other link?) than an argument.
> It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
Part of the author's argument is that it doesn't do a good job of arguing at all, let alone quickly and effectively. It just inundates you with so many words and "facts" that people get bowled over by how "smart" it sounds.
> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
Wow, it is amazing to me that there is a wikipedia page about people who read Scott Alexander's blog. Still, it is (or was) a darn good blog back in the day.
I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.
Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.
You cannot claim that your search for knowledge is deep while simultaneously dismissing most previous work on the topic. In the rationalists case they have little knowledge of historical and contemporary philosophy.
Because they know that quantity is a substitute for quality. If you write enough words about something, no matter how nonsensical your actual arguments are, people tend to assume you know what you are talking about. If someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments you just say "well you aren't addressing all my other arguments"
It's autistic / adhd hyperverbosity. Rationalists are a social group of neurodiverse people and attract neurodiverse people as a result.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
The issue is that you've got to build shared context before people can follow an unstructured dump of everything in your brain. You have to tell a story that makes sense. Also, ideally you figure out how to filter out the stuff that other people simply don't need to know. It is not easy, but it is a skill you can learn.
How ND of you! There is a difference because the when the ND person misses the mark they get reactions of confusion. What you're talking about has a huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry
- not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
You are also missing the point, being ND doesn't mean you are hyper verbose, always. This overall sour grapes about how NTs have social instincts is a typical development of autistic people over the years, which you are also exhibiting.
It's not an accusation, but a mirror to help them potentially realize something, so they don't suffer so much through life so. When you realize what is happening, it helps release a lot of suffering in a person's life. The sour grapes is not helpful, NT social instincts are not going away and it's better to understand and work with the world than to be upset that rain happens sometimes and it just should never exist!
NT social instincts does not mean the person is super effective socially and everything else, but it's a very useful tool if they decide to develop their social skills.
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this topic earlier today. It seems that we train students to write in the worst way possible, by giving arbitrary word counts as benchmark for completeness.
I suppose letting students turn in 3 sentence essays may not be a better option, but it at least it doesn't encourage students who engage with the assignment in good faith to turn a high-quality six paragraphs into six pages.
Having a well-defined rubric is better than having a minimum word count or page count. If they can meet all the rubric's requirements in 3 sentences then so be it.
The alternative is to "turn in a good paper" which is not quantifiable and thus anathema to the modern Taylorism inspired world of education. If the student can't agree, it's a problem and so word count it is - can't argue with basic math.
There are still unquantifiable aspects of grading. Just turning in 1000 words or whatever doesn't guarantee an A, it's a bare minimum in a still-mostly-unquantifiable grading system.
Grading in writing has always felt nonsensical to me. When I didn't get a perfect score in math, the teacher could point out what I did wrong and how I would have been able to do it right.
None of the people grading my writing ever even attempted to do that. The grade existed separately from my writing and served no purpose of education.
I once turned in a five sentence essay that covered about a single page. The person next to me in class turned in five pages, but ultimately got the same grade as me. That's when I realized how stupid it all was.
Most of the time the benchmark word count isn't any more than six paragraphs to begin with. And putting out more words means more practice, which is valuable in a school setting.
First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")
Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.
Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.
It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.
Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.
Philosophy also tends to rattle on. I think part of it is that if the ideas are not that strong and seem obvious or wrong if stated briefly you can make it look more significant by lengthening up.
A lot of academics are bad writers, philosophers included. In my opinion, philosophy is actually far from the worst offender. If you read philosophers who are good at writing and actually have something to say (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf) they can be short and illuminating.
By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.
Or there is a lot of nuance and long history of arguments behind concepts like free will, consciousness, realism, emergence. You can't simplify the arguments without glossing over a lot of detail. Philosophers prattle on because they're responding to all that. They're aware of the various objections to their position.
Yes, a lot of pieces just aren't written for beginners, they are part of an ongoing and voluminous discourse. Writing something short just wouldn't be very interesting (for the experts), they want to engage with all of the prior art.
I think that when references to the prior work are only implicit, pieces tend to be nearly unreadable for casual readers.
However, when interesting counter arguments are stated explicitly, the long articles can still be kind of fun, and personally think this is something Scott Alexander does pretty well, for instance. He is not the main offender of unreadable long rationalist blog posts, of which there are many.
I guess with something like consciousness you get a lot of so and so said this and that guy said that but I where I think they went wrong is this point. I've yet to find it very illuminating when it goes much beyond scientific observation though.
I have a theory the best philosophy can be stated simply and briefly. Like with consciousness Nagel asking what it's like to be a bat is an interesting idea but you don't need hundreds of pages to explain it.
Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
I've been reading stuff from the rationalist community for a long time. Here's some related comments that might be helpful:
* Writing to think -- writing about a subject to understand it better -- is a common technique in online rationalist circles
* I often just throw long (esp rationalist) essays at my LLM text summarizer script to see if they would be something I'd like to read. It works well for me
* Rationalism the subculture, rationalism the skill, rationalism the subject, rationalism the mindset, etc, all seem pretty distinct. This comment is more for the comments here (mftch)
* Inducing a trait from a few examples to a whole group (esp a long tailed (ie diverse) group) is usually a bad idea. Exposure is often a good remedy for that. (mftch)
* It might just be me, but it seems that both the online rationalist community and hacker news comments cultures have evolved a lot in the last few years (mftch)
As a philosophy major, I can confirm that the field generally rewards those who make good arguments for bad ideas, and that for reasons that I never fully understood, texts always seem to be far more verbose than necessary.
It's pretty remarkable to see 'I don't like them, therefore their arguments are all terrible' in action, but it's so rampant in this comments section it's genuinely sad. Every single argument against rationalists can be leveraged at academic philosophers too.
"Back in my day", HN felt more signal than noise. Oh there was flaming and name calling, but there was a lot less of what you point out: simple outgroup dunking.
Yeah this was one of the stupidest comment sections I've read on this site in recent memory, and these days the commentary here is definitely not high-brow. Most of the comments were just "I don't like rationalists so they're stupid." I think there's plenty of very obvious, fertile critique one can make against rationalists but there's so little of that here in this comments section that it makes me quite sad.
The author doesn't seem to have considered that this might just be a matter of taste.
I personally find this kind of overly verbose blog post enjoyable to read (even when, as in the case of Scott Alexander and the internet rationalists, I disagree with a lot of the substance).
Same reason I like A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Admiral Cloudberg, Perun (Youtube), and various other long form content blogs and channels. These could all get to the point much faster, but that's not what they're trying to do.
For me - the nerdy deep dive + relatively low information density + analytical style makes for a pleasurable reading / watching experience.
Also most people on lesswrong are likely on the spectrum and are used to needing to overexplain themselves because neurotypical people rarely give them the benefit of the doubt.
That really is a fine book, it brings back good memories.
However, I don't think this article is really complaining about style. Scott Alexander has great style, the clarity/grace people would find much to love about him.
The complaint is about the length of his writing, and the content, ie focusing on endless arguments as opposed to honoring prior traditions.
Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
The first sentence is a link to the Gwern essay, which does indeed have over 100 references and is rigorously argued and appropriately caveated.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
> The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
It would have taken 10 seconds to put a bit right at the top that says 'do not see this article as an excuse to go smoke or vape' or maybe even something harsher than that. With great power etc ...
Most countries have laws that tax all tobacco sales and direct those proceeds into public education campaigns that warn of the dangers of nicotine. These are multi-million-dollar PR campaigns; I like gwern’s essays but they don’t stand a chance against that level of background radiation. A normal person essentially cannot be convinced that nicotine is safe.
Yes, I hate to admit I am/was someone that assumed nicotine is bad, but Gwern's article is fascinating and well researched. This was a poor hill to die on for this article.
No nicotine is actually basically bad. Basically all the scientific evidence we have on nicotine products is that it’s bad and addictive. It is a stimulant though, which means it can, potentially, help people with conditions like ADHD. But then again, we have real medicine for those, that we know works.
All the people who think nicotine is not that bad have clearly not used it long enough, and aren’t addicted enough. There does come a point where it will feel like your bones are trying to escape your body when you dare relinquish from nicotine. Then, it will be clear it is bad.
If there are any doubts nicotine is bad, simply ask nicotine users. And by that I mean, not the people who used Zyn once or twice to study for an exam.
It's like cocaine. It is bad, no doubt. It is also a stimulant. If Gwern had written about cocaine instead of nicotine it would have likely gotten a different reception, but it actually would have been roughly the same kind of article.
I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.
(To clarify the Gwernpost, nicotine isn't primarily addictive but habit forming. So for instance if you get your nicotine from cigarettes you end up habituated to smoking cigs, and so on. But you can use it to habituate to anything else as well.)
Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.
> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.
Mm, of course, the already-too-long and too-heavily-referenced essay just needed to be longer and more referenced, then it would count as Science, which would give it the standing to be allowed to challenge those two tweets.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.
I don't think its just rationalist blogs who do this. Authors don't realise how little time people have now and catching anyone's attention is a miracle. These examples for the nicotine aren't the best though. Gwern's articles are long because he includes literally every thing he can possibly find on a subject. They're not meant to be like short summaries but more like evolving wikipedia articles.
If you read what gwern says on nicotine its far more nuanced than "nicotine is fine, use nicotine." He does acknowledge that frequent use leads to tolerance. But tolerance is not the same as addiction. I think also if you're going to try argue against his post (which is thoroughly researched) then you ought to do better than just set up a strawman and say he's wrong....
Because a defining feature of those people is confusing the appearance of seriousness with seriousness itself, just like they confuse their ideological preference with rationality.
I love the rationalist blogosphere but agree with this 100%. I was actually having a very similar thought this morning (specifically about the book reviews in the ACX contest and how they seem to keep getting longer).
This is embarrassing, I studied philosophy and worked as a researcher in the discipline for more than 20 years, and I've never heard of "rationalist blogs." Of course, I know what "rationalism" would be as an old philosophical tradition. I also call myself an anti-irrationalist (which is different from rationalism in the sense I know).
Can someone explain to me what "rationalist blogs" and the "rationalists" behind them are? (Of course, I could use Google but I'd like to tap into HN's crowd intelligence in this case.)
Community of people that orbit around LessWrong and a list of bloggers that have some weird ideas about reality. The reason they are "important" is that lots of SV/bay are engineers are into rationalism, and believe some things about AI because they consider themselves rationalists
A problem with long articles is there are so many important topics to be informed about today, and if I spend an hour on one, then I don't have time for others.
I think it comes from their culture "growing up" in hostile parts of the internet (twitter, Reddit, HN, etc) and so having to hedge every statement with excruciating delineation of edge cases and precise scoping lest some sneering POS leave drive by comments that twist their words into some straw man that the local majority will be against.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a group signaling mechanism.
I'm not being funny, but how do you expect to find a receptive audience for your belief system when you apparently write off a variety of audiences as 'sneering POSs' who are out to get you from the start?
First off, it's not my belief system. I'm not a rationalist.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
i think there is room for word vomit overexplaining every little nuance, detail, and caveat as a style of writing especially if one is trying to be through and “rational”, but I think it takes much more skill to condense the meat of a subject
I think it's pretty simple. To prioritize concision, you need to value other people's time more than stroking your own ego. A lot of "rationalists" are just people who, more than anything else, think they are smarter than other people and desperately need to prove it. This naturally means they don't respect other people's time and it naturally leads to voluminous prose.
I’m not sure what this “rationalist” thing is but I think almost every blog entry is too long. Half the posts on this site are too long, get to the point. I have actual books to read by people that wrote their works 100 years ago, why would I spend an hour reading something that was written in San Francisco last week?
On an internet where almost every atypical person can find a niche to fit their oddities, rationalism is one of the bubbles for people who are strongly inclined toward (and have the time for) very long, clever-sounding essays. Pretty much everything else is downstream of that bias, so there's no real prospect of improvement.
As one young philosopher put it, wisdom is a moral choice. It is a decision to only speak about what you truly know; and that is very little. E. g. most of us do not truly know the Earth is a sphere; we only "know" this from a hearsay and that is not it.
What irks me the most about rationalists is their inability to acknowledge their own biases. The nicotine article linked was a series of citations linked by some commentary in between where the author immediately dismissed any sources that opposed their beliefs while backing their points with studies that had the same or worse methodological issues. A bit too much nitpicking to my taste, and a bit too much reliance on hiding behind seemingly scientific language.
Assuming I am a rationalist (I honestly don't like this word, it's more of a self-identifying label; if not it is just saying something really trivial. But yet these people, probably only on LW, decide to call them so, so let's use that word) and is writing to others on this forum, I would assume that they have the same mindset and peer review standard as mine, so I would not write with defensive mindset emphasized.
The rationalist community seems great at rationalizing their bias, not at rational or critical thought. They will argue their way into anything - but that makes them good debaters or writers, not good thinkers.
Some arguments about future predictions seem like a sci-fi fan base nerding about their favorite stories, but without any self awareness.
You get a nerds wet dream: nerdy stuff and ego boost. But very detached from reality.
Probably not universally true, but good writing is a skill regardless.
And maybe they are "too long" in the same way that Lean proofs are "too long"? I have no idea - I don't read either very often.
However, often I don't care how verbose a piece is if it can hold my interest. For example, the late Umberto Eco wrote some of my favourite pieces. He was a philosopher (among other things), and many of them - notably of the "post-modern" - are known to be particularly verbose.
Any movement that names themselves after how right they are is suspect.
Similarly movements who use catchphrases for this, like when Kier Starmers centrist version of Labour started calling themselves "the adults in the room" - it gave away their entitlement to lead.
"Rationalists" can't be wrong - it's in the name, any one disagreeing is just irrational.
Rationalists change their position when being shown to be wrong. To err is human, after all. But to insist on your original wrong position is irrational.
They are insecure and want to appear smart, and think long writing == smart.
To be contrarian isn't to be a "free thinker", it's to be led around like a dog on a leash. You're just a reactionary saying the opposite of an actual opinion.
If I had to wager, I'd say both of those points stem from being bullied in school more often than not.
> It seems to me that, in this community, verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness...
Not only in that community. I see it a lot at my job too, waffling and loudness as a substitute for knowledge, skill and diligence. I think maybe plato wrote something about this in the gorgias
I wish there was a much greater stigma against providing unsolicited, almost certainly non-professional medical diagnoses of third parties like you have done.
Whatever the faults of internet rationalists, suggesting that they have a mental health disorder is incredibly anti-social behaviour.
I didn't provide a diagnosis, I pointed out that this was a symptom shared by multiple medical conditions. The difference may seem small but it is nonetheless crucial.
Also if I wasn't incredibly anti-social, I wouldn't be on this site in the first place.
They just keep going on and on. I wondered why. I think it's because at every point, the person either stopped and bought, or... they're still reading so... you may as well hit them with MOAR and MOAR!
I think rationalist blogs are often useful for self improvement. It's like a lot of religious thought, if you take it too seriously you'll go insane but in small doses it makes you better
Because r >> g. These people don't need to work and need to find some outlet for their efforts since the labor market cannot compete with their current investment returns.
I don't think you can ever identify why someone is going to prattle on for days on a topic. Could be they're trying to convince themselves as much as those around them.
A big part of this will be in-group signalling. Humans always do this, starting at the school playground. They adopt the habits of what they consider to be their in-group. It is why so much of the material (blogs, essays, comments on blogs, etc) come across as infuriating to the average reader.
In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.
(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).
They are also very repetitive. When I started reading it (back in 2015 I think?) I thought that they had some interesting info, but needed a good editor to remove at least 60% of the material; many chapters argued the exact same point as the previous chapter, with a slightly different analogy. Also many are responses to other blogs of the time, which also isn't interesting to read in a book since you don't have any context. Very tiresome to read.
TLDR: Because reality is way more complex than any of its representations.
--
If person rationalist they
> prioritizes explicit reasoning, logic, and evidence over intuition, tradition, or emotion.
By sticking to this principle one has to describe every cause-effect, every idea from their speech. Reality is way more complex and detailed than any of it's representations. So rationalist can keep detailing and grounding everything they touch in their speech, and then ground grounds and so on. Sticking to rationalist values you have to write more and ground more.
By cutting corners of explanation and reason rationalist's claims they becoming less rationalist and less acceptable by the group, thus less popular. So the more you're rationalist, more popular you are more you have to write. It's natural way of things.
--
Irinically the complete rationalism isn't achievable because Gödel's incompleteness teorem.
> There will always be true statements about symbols that the system can write down, but cannot prove or disprove using its own rules.
They, we all have to draw a logical/grounding line somewhere, either by choice either by incapacity.
I think it's just the blog version of gish gallop. They just say a bunch of stuff that sounds smart to people who don't have much knowledge in certain areas, so much that it'll take too much effort to rebut, in hopes that you stop thinking about it and just accept their arguments. I only just heard of that Eliezer Yudkowsky guy the other day, and when I looked him up I stumbled upon a reddit thread where he makes a fool of himself talking about probabilities. So I wouldn't trust a single thing that guy says. https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm...
Also I think the name "Rationalist" is kinda funny. Reminds me of that Antifa meme, "we're the anti bad guy squad, and our opponents are the bad guys! Everything we do is justified because we fight bad guys obviously!" Except these guys are the Rationalists. Everything they do is rational, and if you don't agree with them, then you're irrational obviously.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and adds weight to the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.
It’s another red flag. I don’t read “rationalist” blog posts but I’ve seen verbosity before. It’s a pseudo-intellectual effect. It’s a kind of propaganda method. You talk and write very long and convoluted. No one really understands you but they assume you know what you’re talking about and tend to buy what you sell. Of course this requires a “community” praising the person who talks a lot. Otherwise no one would read/listen to them.
I’ve seen this tactic in politics and media, to sway public opinion (into something against public’s interest and against basic common sense). I’ve seen with charismatic leaders and followers of religious cults. They talk a lot, write thick books but say little of value. I’ve seen this with people selling Ponzi schemes.
I think the common theme is they have to go against the common sense and have to weaken defense mechanisms of the target. But they have no real arguments that can be summarized clearly in a few sentences. Such arguments would be easy to understand and refute.
“Do not be rash with your mouth,
And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God.
For God is in heaven, and you on earth;
Therefore let your words be few.
For a dream comes through much activity,
And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly (some translations "as his folly deserves"), lest he be wise in his own eyes." - Proverbs 26:4,5
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.
It's called the bullshit firehose. It's designed to make you give up arguing, because who has the time? Unfortunately, naturally trusting people are often ensnared.
Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.
Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.
The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.
But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)
Cocaine is bad. So is nicotine. Because on balance they are bad, even if they have good properties. You can spend 30K words on 'the good sides' but on balance they are still bad.
"On balance they are still bad" is a statement that one justifies by actually comparing the good and bad properties. It seems pretty clear (though I could be wrong!) that for cocaine the bad outweighs the good. It's less obvious for nicotine or, to name another legal stimulant drug, caffeine.
But apparently spending 30k words trying to explore the tradeoff is a bad thing? Because it should just be obvious that Nicotine Is Bad on balance, without weighing up the benefits and the harms?
I dunno, maybe gwern's article about nicotine is in fact terrible. I've only looked at it very briefly, and superficially it looks reasonable to me.
"But it turns out that actually nicotine[1] is addictive and bad for you -- Alex's post had a link supporting that." Eh. Alex's post had a link to something that ... actually could be fairly summarized as "I haven't found nicotine[1] addictive and it seems to be good for me overall". What Alex presumably has in mind is the three tweets at the end of the article, under the heading "PS: Be careful". One claims, not giving any evidence, that a bunch of people read gwern's article and ended up addicted to tobacco. One claims, not giving any details, that gwern's article "almost ruined my life". One sketches a way someone could end up in trouble after reading the article, though it isn't clear to me whether its author is saying "this is what happened to me" or "I can imagine this happening" and it looks much more like the latter.
[1] Throughout this paragraph "nicotine" means "nicotine not taken by smoking or vaping"; it isn't surprising that there might be a difference and gwern's article very strongly advises not doing those things.
If you weren't predisposed to think ill of gwern and his writing, would you actually be impressed by this? On the one hand we have what looks like a careful weighing of harms and benefits, with references to the literature; on the other hand we have at most three anecdotes with no details at all. It could still be that they're right and gwern's wrong, of course, but "look at this loser, he posted all those words and here are three tweets that point the other way" doesn't seem like much of an argument to me.
Some of Gwerns's articles are evergreens and I really like them.
This one in particular looks like a lot of handwaving and justification for self medication.
People aren't perfect. Gwern has a good reputation but he's still human and most likely has flaws, this one article in particular looks pretty flawed to me.
Rationality is mostly absence of bs, so when you sit down to write about it, you are most likely already a person who produces too much words on any subject.
It’s called a gish gallop. Rationalists are masters at bullshitting, and the best way to do that is to say so many things that people can’t really devote the time to proving you wrong. If they do try, they counter with even more words until you give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.
This is a funny juxtaposition; I grew up creationist, and 'gish gallop' of course originated as something the rationalists [0] used to describe the creationists! 'rationalist' may have shifted slightly as a descriptor, but honestly perhaps the shoe has always fit pretty well.
There's a lot of parallels between rationalist belief in AI and religious belief in God. Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager. The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture. There's similar group dynamics with high priests (tech CEOs), theologians (Yud, SA), sacred texts (various substacks, lesswrong), heresies (logical fallacies)...
I'm not the only one who's noticed it:
"Why do tech CEOs sound like doomsday cult leaders?"
I see this said all the time and I think it's almost entirely wrong.
(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)
"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.
"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)
"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.
(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)
"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)
"sacred texts": see above.
"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that. If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
You might be able to make an argument that Roko's basilisk is an example of a heresy within rationalism? But I don't think the existence of inside-baseball debates where some positions are officially deprecated is terribly specifically religious. The idea that goto statements are a great way of structuring a piece of computer software would be a heresy, for instance. Belief in "cold fusion" would be another. But computing and physics aren't religion-like in any useful sense on that account.
I should maybe clarify that when I say "I see this said all the time" I don't mean specifically the version targeted at internet-rationalists. There's the version aimed at singularitarians (not all internet-rationalists are singularitarians nor vice versa) and a slightly different version claiming that atheism is just another religion, and so forth. The general template is: Thing X is just another religion / just warmed-over Christianity, because here are half a dozen things about it that have some loose resemblance to some religious thing. I find such things uniformly unconvincing; it seems to me that one can draw loose parallels between almost anything and almost anything else.
And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.
I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".
I'm not going to get drawn into a thousands paragraph debate about rationalists belief, so this will be my only reply and I'll welcome your rebottle.
Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.
And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:
"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."
Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.
> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!
I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.
> every field will have its "theologians"
They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.
> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise, and why it was so easy to be fooled by people like Musk who used good arguments but lacked actual expertise.
If you think it's likely that there will be a singularity and it will be bad, then you'll regard someone working toward it as bad. That doesn't mean that there's any good-versus-evil-ness about the singularity itself. Whereas Armageddon is specifically a battle of good against evil, the Last Judgement is specifically a separation of people into (something like) good versus evil, etc.
The "betrayal" line is saying that OpenAI was founded as, supposedly, an ethical company trying to make sure that AI worked out for the good of humanity, and Altman is failing to live up to that. It doesn't have anything to do with any high view of Altman personally.
I agree that that line is more positive about both Musk and Zuckerberg than either deserves. But the claim wasn't "some rationalists think too highly of tech CEOs", it was "rationalists think about tech CEOs like religious people think about their high priests", and the point is that nothing I've found suggests that that's so. Sometimes people say nice things about (say) Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes not so nice (there was one comment where someone suggested that a different approach to AI safety might have resulted in "Mark Zuckerberg stamping on a face for ever") but no more of it than in the world at large is looking reverently to them as authorities.
If you're happy also saying that computer science and academia in general are religions, then fair enough, but at this point I think saying "X is a religion" is no longer really saying anything.
I don't know whether you're right or wrong in saying that rationalists are too unwilling to accept arguments that are logically invalid but persuasive in other ways, but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
It's like those HN commenters who just spew links to cherry picked sources at you when you call them out for misleading people. It's an only slightly obfuscated attempt to move the goalposts from "hey idiot take a step back and look at the big picture, your core point is garbage and you're a bad person for even making it" type argument to one of implicitly accepting their premise and then bickering over sources (in the case of the filthy linkposters) or the exact nature of the minutia and excruciating detail they have produced in droves (in the case of the rationalists).
That said I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.
What, exactly, is the point of this post, and especially the point of it on HN? It appears to be a rant directed at 2 people on the internet that has nothing to do with tech.
> nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
Indeed, it seems to me that nicotine may indeed have beneficial effects in some contexts.
It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.
The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.
The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)
Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.
Oh, I assure you that I don't trust my imagination on this!
Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.
So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)
And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.
It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.
It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...
And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...
Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol
Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."
And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"
At that point I was like whoa.
Here's a bunch of research stuff on ambroxol and Parkinson's:
Ambroxol-induced rescue of defective glucocerebrosidase is associated with increased LIMP-2 and saposin C levels in GBA1 mutant Parkinson's disease cells – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26094596/
Ambroxol as a disease-modifying treatment to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in GBA-associated Parkinson’s disease: a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase II trial. The AMBITIOUS study protocol – https://neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000535
So a thing with these studies is that it's looks like ambroxol doses for Parkinson's need to be substantially higher than the cough-syrup/OTC-mucolytic doses. Seemingly to get enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. So this doesn't pin down any pulmonary foundation for Parkinson's.
But it is very, very interesting that... practically all of the stuff that impacts Parkinson's for better or worse always has a pulmonary element. All of it, as far as I can tell. But I don't know! I'm just seeing a structure of evidence as leaning a certain way. Could just be my imagination. And I don't trust it. But I'ma keep reading for sure.
Not sure about earlier, but during WWI cigarettes were smoked at incredible scale, to help deal with the stresses and horrors of war. Ensuring an ample supply to front-line troops was major gov't priority.
And I certainly have known cigarette smokers who explained "yes, I know they cause cancer and other bad stuff - but they also help with other serious (physical and mental) problems that I have, and I'm choosing quality of life over quantity".
This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
Personally, I often write long responses when making a contrarian point. The reason is because people have been heavily conditioned to believe certain things and making a contrarian point requires you to provide an alternative interpretation for all of their many beliefs around the subject.
Every contrarian idea has to dismantle layer upon layer of existing beliefs to even be considered plausible. Many people will discard it outright because of how much it goes against their worldview.
The worst part is that people have also been conditioned to believe that long, detailed explanations are the result of delusions built up in social media 'echo chambers' or 'conspiracy theories' based upon fake news. LLMs will typically act as though they are concerned for your mental health if you provide a valid rebuttal to all of their points in such a discussion; they will say "Note what you did, you've made your argument unfalsifiable..." And I have to point out that its own mainstream version is also merely a narrative and also unfalsifiable and backed by even less evidence. The discussion has to be evaluated from first principles, taking into account empirical evidence, trends and incentives.
Incentives are much more important than simplicity of arguments to estimate accuracy. People will go to great lengths to obtain rewards and avoid punishment. Often, reality is complicated, not simple. Occam's razor generally isn't correct these days. Perhaps it was at one point in the past; those were simpler times.
From my own life experience and behavior, there are no simple explanations for anything I did or what happened to me; so I don't see why simple explanations are valid for anyone else. Occam's razor is essentially part of Hollywood's conditioning; conditioning people to people map their lived experiences into simple movie-like narratives.
If the ideas are not complex enough to warrant a long explanation, it is a failure of the writer to be unable to produce the same information more succinctly.
Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.
Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.
I'm a really slow reader. Had some hilarious conversations with fast readers. They really enjoy fluffy low density content. I ask what is on the page they just read and their first reaction is to look at it again. I describe barely related thoughts I had reading the page, the character of the author from their choice of words, they look at me as if I've done just the thing you aren't suppose to.
But "a lot more" is not a bounded heuristic. A good communicator would use more words to defend and idea than to present it, but way less than a bad communicator.
Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.
Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.
My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill. The dilemma of the rationalist writer is about whether be skipped by wizards or be understandable by maglesses.
You can take the truthest truth ever like "god does not exist". This statement is rationalist and true and short so the author is supposed to cry with a tears of happiness. But making a wisard to behave like this requires something more thorough to be sent. Maybe the author's post also has a chance to become a rationalist if it would be a little bit... longer?
I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.
Nothing requires you to abandon skimming. But imagine some Christian person which is going to become an atheist. If the rationalist resource requires the reader to have in his mind all the atheist memes, he will never switch and probably report some errors. If you are a bald reader then have a bit of respect who might read these things his first time. Rationalist articles should be made for stupids, like a "technology connections" yt channel. If you are not stupid, you might not need to read a rationalist's stuff any more to save your time for more advanced topics.
I don’t think brief writing has to be niche/rely on pre-existing context in its audience. Good writing is accessible because it is brief.
The assumption that “stupids” are going to be more receptive to long-form/from-first-principles arguments is wrong, I think. So is the assumption that that’s why rationalists write that way (it’s more likely because of bubble culture and/or because people like hearing themselves talk).
I tried to search about it, and Google AI overview gave an answer based on your comment. I didn't find anything about magless in rationalism page on Wikipedia or LessWrong, so the answer was based only on this thread. I'm surprised about how easy is to mess with AI overview answers like that. State actors must have been doing this by the clock
If he would follow his own advice he just put the Pascal's quote, maybe in slightly different words. What is this article if not a rationalist blog post way too long for the scope of thoughts has been put within?
Do you not think their belief to some extent involves believing formalizing things [even to a reductively useless point] makes them more adept at understanding the world?
Do not tell anyone I still have not achieved C1. And sorry for not using a spellchecker, the war condition and scattered blackouts is why I am busy with trolling on the only resource on the Internets which provides a decent experience via edge (2.5G).
The post's clearest claim is that rationalists "lack wisdom" and makes a circular argument - posts are too long because they lack the wisdom to make shorter posts, and the evidence for the lack of wisdom is the length of the posts. It says nothing useful or with predictive power. Another claim is that they didn't read an article by Scott Alexander, they didn't have much to say about it, and somehow conclude that makes them wiser, or a better writer, or superior in some vague way.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
> "Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.
Take this HN thread, here are some comments that could all be replaced with "because <someone else> is dumber than me" and convey the same meaning:
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
- "When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere."
- "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
You aren't being asked to speak on behalf of Hacker New commenters, I'm asking you things like:
- why are you surprised that anyone doesn't like being sneered at?
- do you think those 'sneering' comments I quoted are good and interesting, would you like it if there were more of them?
- why were your words ""Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something" when sneering and not engaging are different things?
- why are you surprised that a group which is trying to avoid the normal vibes, personal attacks, gut feelings, and instead focus on evidence, logic and reasoning, is particularly against the things they are trying to avoid?
In your original comment, you quoted my text. In the follow-up, you changed the subject, talking about a bunch of other comments (most of which are heavily downvoted). My reply was a commentary on my text, not what anyone else said. My point was that you took one mildly acerbic offhand comment and made it out to be something that it was not (i.e. unfairly cruel and hostile). This is because you interpreted offhand dismissal as "sneering." Frankly, your reply was far ruder and more sarcastic than anything I said.
Once you decide that you believe what you believe because you are very smart and almost always believe true things, and the things you believe just happen to be the true ones (I am being unfair but I think this is the psychological effect of this so-called rationalism) it's not a big leap to: everything I have to say is worth hearing.
> So why, then, does truth sometimes engender hatred? Why does the servant of God come to be an enemy of those who want a happy life, even though true happiness is joy in the truth? The reason must be this: Our love of truth is such that when we love something that’s not the truth, we pretend to ourselves that we we love is the truth. Then, because we hate to be proved wrong, we’re unwilling to be convinced that we’ve deceived ourselves. In this way, then, people hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love more than the truth. They love truth when it shines warmly on them, and hate it when it rebukes them.
* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
Feels personal
I feel like Scott Alexander sacrificed the truth on the alter of status a long time ago
Why?
It’s a feeling that I got from reading his stuff over the years. Asking the AI just now comes up with a number of examples where he himself admitted to it. I also found him increasingly disingenuous.
~ 397–400 AD(!)
Can this truly be the reason? Aren't there infinitly many non-verbose writers out there who believe themselves to be correct just as much?
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
I always get the impression that they correlate length and correctness. As if the Perfect Best Answer to some question is an infinitely long essay that resembles someone’s rambling mind obsessing over a particular topic, forever.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Length is no substitute for substance. However, reality, as they say, has an surprising amount of detail. That means if someones goal is to adequately represent it you will not be able to do so in a engaging, polemic one-liner that puts everything neatly into a box.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
The linked post points out that writing from the rationality community often spends excess time on insubstantial parts of an argument, which can actually distract focus from the truly essential reasoning and doesn't help the reader. I've read a lot from LessWrong/rationality adjacent community and agree with that observation.
Thanks for the friendly clarification
> Length is just an attempt to be less wrong
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Yeah sure. Writing is a way of structuring your thinking. Now whether you need to air that out to the public is a question of character. I tend to do 90% of writing purely for myself and need to force myself to write a blog post, for others that may differ.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.
Oh God, that's why pastors keep giving long-winded sermons that are claim after claim after claim and without any argumentative structure (and divine inspiration stands in for self-belief in one's own intelligence)
The only time I was wrong was when I thought I was wrong
Einstein?
Gesundheit.
Such a great description of Rationalism: "I am very smart and I made up a methodology that is infallible therefore..."
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
I've never seen someone describe the movement as infallible. They are pretty self critical if you actually read their writing.
I think their self-criticism is an act, a sham to make their arguments look stronger. They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors, especially if they come from outside the rationalist community.
It's like this:
I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.
Ask any cryptographer how well that works.
This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.
> They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors
What's an example of one?
Scott Alexander's comment on Effectivealtruism.org's purchase of a £15M estate is an example. See [0] for the quote and my comment on it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38035639
I'm not sure what the mistake was there? I thought their whole thing was judging orgs by cost:benefit calculation, which this seems to fit.
That or it’s just a blind spot. Plenty of people can say they are rational but not execute on it well.
Yeah but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves? Are they open to criticism they didn't come up with themselves?
I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.
> but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves?
yes, frequently
https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=i%20was%20wrong
IMO it seems to happen more often than in most other online communities
Ahh yes, the extreme intellectual humility of lesswrong and the EA guys! ;)
Correct. They basically just want intelligence to determine social ranking in society.
Whether society eats the people at the bottom or not doesn't matter to them, they just want to be at the top.
If AI is at the top then they will be thrown into the hypothetical meat grinder [0] they thought they were safe from. So AI is the devil to them because it breaks their ideology at its core.
[0] Is it hypothetical if a rationalist is scared of it?
I think a lot of people are tempted to define the people they disagree with as idiots. Not all of them write down their thoughts at length. Both the verbosity and the edgelordery seem to be part of the culture of that community rather than inherent consequences. I think the sequences and HPMOR started or popularised a sort of norm that length is indicative of serious thought.
When I was younger I kinda liked edgy topics and stances for the sake of being edgy. I can easily see how self identified rationalist people that want e.g. racial superiority to be true persuade them self into believing that by looking at economical outcomes and crime statistics handwaiving away historical circumstances and the pressure on the bottom rungs of society which are in the bottom be design.
Their leaning towards fascism is some sort of reductionism for these people I think. In essence political violence make the perpetrators more powerful than if they were nice playing liberals given the same popular support. Thus fuscism. Q.E.D.
Way too little focus on second or third order effects.
Rightwing radicals that 10 to 30 years ago would say they are libertarians are now fascists instead. It is really strange to witness. I think there is a lack of focus on second or third order effects. It is just problem and superficial cause. How hard can it be, just do it, etc.
On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
I think rationalism might be one of those things where those self identifying and those practicing might only be slightly intersecting.
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
That feels like a "no true scotsman"...
It shouldn't.
You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
> You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
Right, one could make that statement. It would be silly, but they could make it. I think most people who consider themselves good at basketball are probably better than average at basketball.
> That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Is the notion that someone who's not good at basketball can't recognize a good basketball player?
I'm a little confused by your metaphor.
I actually think my metaphor is also true. Based upon what I have observed in real life it seems to hold up.
I should note that you changed the statement from say to consider themselves. It is entirely possible (and rather frequent) for people who do not consider themselves good at basketball to say that they are. People who actually are good at basketball quite often do not feel the need to say so, because it is apparent when they play.
I can change "consider themselves to be rationalists" to "say they are good at basketball" because that is just a change of premise. It leaves the structure the same.
You tipped your hand by calling the metaphor silly immediately before admitting that you are confused by it.
In the context of this discussion, rationalist should be taken to refer to people who are or have been active on LessWrong
This unfortunately doesn’t help if it isn’t paired with withholding judgement in the face of insufficient evidence, but rationalists don’t do that. They just pick a model they like and continue, and the burden of scrutinizing that model is on others.
Making rational decisions means picking the most responsible option given imperfect information. It doesn't mean delaying decisions until you have perfect information because that point never comes.
Sufficient information, not perfect information.
What's sufficient information is also a huge part of the debate. See: should we start worrying about AI safety or not yet?
Opinions based on insufficient information help immensely in determining whether we have sufficient information, and also raise awareness of important topics that we need more information on. These blog posts serve a very important role in the information exchange ecosystem and the whole world would be worse off if all these people held off until they're 99% certain. Nobody would be talking about climate change, about economy, about quantum gravity, about ancient civilizations, about prehistoric animal species, etc. etc. and so on.
Sure I agree.
Using the easy to defend claim (acting without perfect information is necessary) to defend a much broader one (my judgement is rational and justified based on the information I have) is a classical motte and bailey fallacy.
People in the rationalist community don’t see it, because ironically they’re not rational enough. But they use the language and essay format to make it seem like they are.
Yeah I think it is some form of missplaced reductionism. No information versus perfect information then argue for perfect information.
I wrote in a sibling post that they like fascism because any dispute can be reduced to and solved by beating the counterpart to death with sticks.
If your pick of the option is based on emotion or aesthetics, the decision isn’t rational. Presenting is as such is misleading and dishonest.
Rationalists seem to believe that their ability to convince themselves of anything given enough evidence is a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's a sign of being disconnected from yourself and your true values. There is a great amount of wisdom and intelligence in properly honed intuition.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
I have never seen a room get colder than when I told a bunch of rationalists that intuition has value.
This so-called rationalist movement is better described as rationalisationist movement.
Rationalisation is the default mode of operation for humans. Believe first; find evidence to justify it. That's what everyone is doing. Not that self proclaimed rationalists would be free of that. But pretty unfair characterization for a movement whose key goal is to that as little as possible.
The heart of science is not doing this but checking your reason against reality constantly.
It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.
I would say it is spot on based on what they do, despite being based at doing the opposite.
Their stated key goal is avoiding it, sure. But in practice?
My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".
Not sure - perhaps true for an oversocialized subset or people who try to wield and gather social influence.
Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.
Totally agree, it's like their singular defining characteristic.
It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.
Pretty unfair of you to conflate a movement's stated goals with its behavior when the comment that you are replying to is very obviously talking about the latter. So rationalist!
[flagged]
A big part is that the rationalist community has little respect for traditional philosophical arguments. Consequently they don’t really understand how to make an argument, in the sense of a formal logical framework that can be summarized and critiqued.
Instead they seem to take one premise and just run with it, and tens of thousands of words later, they think they’ve made some profound point.
I’d say that 99% of the rationalist essays I’ve read wouldn’t be given passing grades in an academic philosophy class on the topic.
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
>Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work
My reading is the inability to understand serves only as an educational device for the reader. After all, at the end of the article the only point of contention is whether or not the objective truth exists. Is your point that the postmodern types don't claim that it doesn't? Or that they're an easy target used to later claim victory against a larger group?
Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.
On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.
I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp. It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
> It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research
Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.
Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.
Well for one the main rationalist figure head argued with a straight face on how many people should be saved from getting dust in their eyes to justify torturing a person.
I mean, Yudkowsky is ridiculous, but this is an entirely different argument. That, in any case, isn't Bayesian in the slightest.
You've misunderstood the scare quotes. I meant the community's perception of "Bayesian thinking", rather than Bayesian inference itself. Calling your reasoning Bayesian doesn't establish that it is, much as {{person of particular religion}} calling themselves moral doesn't establish their morality.
Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
t. majored in philosophy
I was being the term academic philosophy to mean the entirety of historical and contemporary thought, not specifically just papers published recently.
That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
I also really don’t think you can just hand wave away the entire history of ideas with vague statements like “from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.”
This attitude is exactly why rationalism is a goofy internet thing and not an actual intellectual movement.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and IME the idea that papers published in leading analytic journals are obscure on purpose is nonsense. There is no tolerance for the kind of handwavy arrogance you’ll find in “internet thought” on blogs and social media.
>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The LW/rationalist space, and other spheres adjacent to it, have a disdain for traditional philosophy, but have spent very little time engaging with that philosophy and giving sufficient reasons as to why it’s not important, or not even worth engaging with.
> Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
I’m not arguing against the average holder of the idea.
I’m saying that the argument that “academic philosophy is verbose and obscure on purpose” isn’t a good argument, and is most often repeated by people with little knowledge of the field, so often that it’s become something of a culture war trope. At the very least it’s a well-known quality of LW and similar spaces.
As in the comments above, there is often no actual paper, no argument, just vague assertions and a couple random name drops, as if that’s an argument.
How would you prove something is overly verbose?
Provide a counter-example where you restate it in less-verbose language without losing critical nuance.
This would, however, typically require developing expertise in a field, and then actually reading and understanding the thing being accused of being obtuse and verbose.
If you can demonstrate that you can do that for any arbitrary paper in a field, then sure, you'll convince me that its practitioners are long-winded gasbags.
You are explicitly responding to a person who is not in that 99.9%.
And you still haven’t made any real point, other than drop a couple names.
What do they have to say? What is their argument? Why is a behavioral economist’s opinion relevant in a discussion about academic philosophy? Etc.
“Academic philosophy is obscure on purpose and X two people say so.” is not an argument.
I would encourage you to consult the aforementioned figures if my observation is not shared by you.
- https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/how-ai-will-revolution...
- https://philpapers.org/rec/ELSHAS (via Sci-Hub)
So just to recap here:
You haven’t produced any summary of an argument, or even a real link to one justifying the claim that all academic philosophy is obscure on purpose, in any of your comments.
Instead you’ve linked to a blog post about AI and academic publishing; and a paper from 15 years ago that says social sciences and humanities are plagued by a problem with obscurity.
This isn’t how actual philosophical debate works. But it’s a perfect example of how LW is not a serious intellectual community.
I have made an observation and allowed the intellectual heavyweights persuade much better those who observe otherwise. Seems quite close to what academics call a "citation".
This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.
I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.
You mean flawed philosophical arguments? I find antiscientist arguments usually flawed, like EAAN and knowability paradox. You can say they are written by preachers so are no true philosophy? Conversely you can say they are high quality, because they are falsifiable.
I'm not a specialist in either, though I know of Plantinga and don't dismiss him as a preacher. From what I was able to find, there's engagement on this topic with back and forth, so I'm not sure it's settled. I'm not sure how much LW posts are discussed by an out-group.
https://fitelson.org/plant.pdf
On knowability, the SEP says: "There is no consensus about whether and where the proof goes wrong", so I'm not sure this is a good example of a trivial issue either.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
And I wasn't claiming philosophy contains no flawed arguments, but dismissing the entire corpus rather than peacemeal attack seems reactionary rather than reformative.
> Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy.
They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.
But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.
The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.
I also studied philosophy.
--- ¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.
> traditional philosophical arguments
Can you share some good books/papers/posts that would be a good introduction to for this?
Any intro to philosophy book is probably good really. But I did just get this one the other day, and I like it:
50 Philosophy Classics by Bowdon.
This is basically a dunk piece. Scott’s and gwern’s posts are often long because they contain arguments, which ironically the author does not use, other to point to one gwern post. He says that rationalists substitute thoroughness for verbosity when gwern’s post does the exact opposite!
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
I think Scott in particular just really enjoys writing. He is very articulate and obviously just brimming with clever connections and turns of phrase. And he can generate a lot of words very easily.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
What the author here misses is that the verbosity is often a signal of work done.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
Precisely the signal that has been lost since the advent of LLMs. Voluminous work has now almost become synonymous with a signal of no effort.
Also literally the post he links to for "its bad actually" is a blog about how it's great and not very addictive and just has some tweets from people who apparently didn't pay attention to the nicotine gum/patch/pouch recommendation in gwern's post and instead started using various forms of tobacco. Very sloppy all around.
Agree with the author. Most rationalist material I've tried to read it's incredibly lengthy and frequently boring. It's also true that they are using verbosity and a certain academic style to hide the lack of precision and correctness. They are prolific writers, but not great.
It reminds me a bit of elaborate theological arguments that build up in denominational seminaries. The authors just have an obsessive compulsion to catalogue and resolve every minute detail, details that only really matter if you've already accepted many other dubious and compounding premises. IE, the articles are really for existing converts.
Ironically very similar to LLM output.
hmm... maybe that's where they got it from in the first place!
lol, Jordan Peterson comes to mind
> How are you today, Jordan?
> What do you mean with 'how'? What is being? Who am I, truly?
The semantic bollocks that man ties himself into sometimes
Let's start with the premise that I'm not okay. So what am I going to do about that? Well I could say woe is me. Where the bloody hell is that going to get me? Now let's presuppose that I am destined to—
Ughh!
He manages to bring every discussion back to: how it's good to believe literally in religious fairy tales, tidying your room, only eating meat, no one else apart from him should decide the meaning of words, and some fever dream he had about lobsters.
And life is suffering
What’s even worse is that the man has a huge following who all think that he isn’t a bullshitter.
People are quite right criticise him. However he did help me (indirectly) when he was on first on Joe Rogan years ago and was talking about addiction. It got me seriously thinking about quitting drink.
I wish he kept to talking more about those subjects and the Bible as I found that much more interesting.
Peterson fallen in a profoundly sad, but also illuminating, way. He obviously had a bit of NPD even from the start, which is true of virtually every public figure. The crack widened and finally split with the help of powerful drugs - fame, money, and Xanax, with a side of audience capture. He quickly went from "liberal Canadian rationalist with the gumption to push back against the left on principle" to just another unthinking right-wing parrot. His view of strength hurt him here, because he was in a crucible that broke him and yet he clearly could not admit it. Contrast him with someone like Sam Harris who, IMO, has been in the crucible for longer but who is far less pugnacious and has managed to maintain his sanity and his nuanced principles despite the forces that want bimodal commentary only.
Sam Harris is not a good example. Sam Harris used to go on hour long crash outs about Trump on his podcast. It became impossible to listen to. I've spoken to people both online and offline who have said that they stopped listening to him because it became unbearable.
Then there is this infamous quote in 2022.
> "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement – I would not have cared."
I understand he is being hyperbolic, but honestly it wasn't that obvious though, because the aforementioned crash outs. He also allowed everyone to be quote mine him. It is an unforced error.
Generally I find Sam Harris tbh to be not particularly that interesting anyway. He gets a lot of mileage (like a lot of these personalities) from his elocution. He makes him sound insightful than he really is.
Well I guess we can agree to disagree because I think there's a lot about Trump to crash out about. It's difficult to understand how someone who so obviously a villain is so popular. It's disorienting and frustrating, like walking out of Star wars hearing people praise Darth Vader for how wonderful he was and how nasty Luke was to him. How The empire is a staple job Creator and the rebel alliance a bunch of filthy blooded miscreants who don't appreciate what they have...
If we are making Star Wars references. The whole lore of Sidious is how he and Plagueis manipulated various parties in the galaxy to gain power. In the story itself it explains how this can happen. The Jedi weren't really the good guys. They were an ossified monastic order that had lost its way.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both rival elites vying for power to enrich themselves and their circle via the apparatus of the Republican and Democratic parties. They are both reprehensible, for different reasons. Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US (the Republicans didn't want him running for the party). There are no good guys here. They were both shit.
The crash out was due to the fact Sam Harris couldn't wrap his head around the fact that people were fed up of public figures that are similar to himself. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing. He appeared to do very little introspection on the matter. His whole brand is him trying to rationally understand what's happening, and he did the exact opposite.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, is another left-wing intellectual that did understand the sentiment and has made an effort to understand people he deeply disagrees with. Guess whose ideas are more relevant currently? It isn't Harris; Harris is irrelevant these days.
> Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US
Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
> There are no good guys here. They were both shit
Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
> Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
I don't understand why people like yourself come up with this stuff. There are loads of clips from 2016 where people were saying this. It's 10 years later, and I am still having conversations where we are denying the reality of what happened; it is bizarre.
> Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
Project 2025 is a thing from the Heritage Foundation and wasn't a thing back in 2016, because it was published in 2023. You are just repeating stuff you've heard on the TV/YouTube.
The Heritage Foundation has been moving towards Paleo-conservatism since about 2021. The Paleo-cons were ejected/rejected from the Republican Party in the Buckley days.
I was talking about the 2016 campaign. Back in 2016 (not 2024), the Republican establishment didn't want him there. Pretending otherwise is asinine.
> The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
People liked Trump because he's brash and loud and has an attractive wife who used to be a model. He has a ridiculous hairstyle. He flew in on a massive jet that has his name on the side of it.
He also trolled/manipulated the media constantly, which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
I am English, I live in the UK. My mates and I would get some beers and watch the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump debates late at night to see the shit show. It was really funny. "What is old Donald going to say this time?!".
I understand that doesn't appeal to everyone, but a lot of people like this stuff. I won't lie, I kind of liked it as well at the time.
Compare that to someone like Jeb Bush or even his opponents, Hillary Clinton; there was no momentum, no hype.
Malcolm McLaren is quoted as saying, "Pro-wrestling is real, and politics is fake." You need to keep that in mind when watching any political coverage.
> Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
No, they didn't. What people like is that he was talking about stuff they cared about and they believed he was speaking for them.
It is 10 years later, and people like yourself are still misstating what people were saying and have done no introspection.
Trump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
You are doing exactly what many people were criticising Sam Harris for. I was fed up of it back in 2017, and you and Sam haven't learnt anything.
It is one of the reasons why I don't bother talking to people about stuff like this, because you can't look past the surface, and you make no attempt to understand what happened.
I spent quite a lot of time reading and interactimg with conservatives and republicans. I am from that environment.
Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
> which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
> rump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
Dissapointingly, I got the exact response I thought I would.
> I spent quite a lot of time reading and interactimg with conservatives and republicans. I am from that environment.
I don't believe you. I am not conservative; I am not American, and I can tell you haven't.
> Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
Why? Because you say so? I don't even understand how it is "self serving bullshit". People were fed up with run-of-the-mill politics. Even on the left wing you had many people that were radical (that have become less so over time) entering into politics around that time.
I also must have imagined reading all the comments and seeing all those videos that people posted around that time, specifically on the theme that they were voting for Trump because they believe he was something different.
I remember listening to many hours of people just talking in Skype, Google Hangouts and similar places at the time. I get really annoyed when people try to gaslight me about events that I was paying a lot of attention to at the time.
> That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
I think it is funny to get CNN to broadcast your rally for you based on deception, because CNN wanted him to something racist and he didn't. He trolled them because they are predictable.
> Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
Apparently you can read minds now. How do you know? I really doubt anyone said, "I know Trump is an evil man, but I am going to vote for him," or something to that effect. If you claim you have. You are lying.
> There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
I am not. The fact that you can't recognise that because I have take on Trump that is sympathetic to MAGA / Trump supporters is ridiculous. Most Trumps aren't far-right either. You say you listen to Republicans and Conservatives, but you clearly aren't if you are claiming that.
I think, TBH, you are lying to me. So I don't want to talk any further. Go away.
I cancelled my subscription. Harris would always get lost in internet wars and definitely spent too much time reading idiots tweets and getting angry over them.
Sure, JD Vance is a cretin and Trump is vile. Can we please go back to intellectually interesting pursuits?
The Economist is so good in this respect.
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
When I open a general article and it starts with things like:
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
I immediately close it.
I'm the opposite and even your example triggered my curiosity. Very few articles capture me like that.
It's all about understanding the medium. The Economist makes a wide-ranging, newsstand magazine that isn't too far different of a medium than like a weekend Financial Times paper. I think blogs, or free-ish or frequently publishing substances, naturally slot into that kind of medium where you want to pack the most info and analysis into a deftly concise format.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
If I had more time I would have written a shorter essay.
[flagged]
"The idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them"
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
Slate Star Codex's review of The Secret of Our Success, arguing specifically in favor of strong Chesterton's Fences, was voted #5 in the 2019 Best of LessWrong review. SSC's review of Seeing Like a State, presenting a similar argument and directly naming Chesterton, was a notable 2017 hit. "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" also argues in favor of maintaining traditional bright lines, hit 700 karma on LW, and is included in the "Best Essays of LessWrong" collection. "Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking" is a 2019 hit following these.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
The chesterton's fence principle is all about a tradition's underlying reason for existing. I'm not sure why you think it contradicts what I said?
I didn't intend to fully contradict what you said, but to make a stronger case, and address similar remarks by others--you made the best comment along those lines, regardless of your balance and nuance.
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
Hang on, your list of counter examples is “one rationalist gave another a thumbs up”?
The list of counter examples is some of the most popular and well-received posts in the rationalist community which are actually in favour of tradition having value.
"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.
There is also value in the abstract sense, meaning tradition can have value for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
> for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
This is an underlying reason
I guess maybe, but it's not intrinsically linked to the event. Like maybe Christmas would be useless if only I celebrated it, but it has a purpose if lots of people celebrate it. Also Christmas is probably not a good example but you get the idea.
Just because tradition can be necessary to the value of some things doesn't mean tradition is sufficient to proving value.
Female genital mutilation is traditional in some places. That alone doesn't mean it's valuable.
Likewise Rationalists agreeing with each other.
Not that FGTM is comparable, but Rationalism really doesn't do as good a job as it believes it does of explaining why people end up believing ridiculous, harmful things.
An effective form of rationalism would be very good at preventing and reversing irrational and harmful beliefs.
There is zero evidence that the Rationalists have done that.
There is value to the engagement that rationalism encourages in figuring out what you believe even if you don't end up convincing anyone else.
The term "Chesterton's Fence" comes to mind.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
Or a recipe at the end because SEO. Really long articles are a negative signal for me unless I know the author to be good.
OT, but my understanding is that recipe sites have long-winded blog posts in front of them because recipes alone are not copyrightable.
I've seen this argument before but I don't think I understand it.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.
Isn't this just the naturalistic fallacy?
Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.
I think the corollary is that they shouldn't be disrespected just because they may be outdated.
One needs to actually spend the time and effort to understand what value is potentially encoded in traditions before suggesting a replacement.
To be fair, the Rationalists _do_ accept the two-word rebuttal "Chesterton's Fence," in principle.
...though yes, in practice if your invoke or, they're fairly likely to explain in elaborate length why it doesn't apply here.
The verbosity and ability to rationalize let's you come up with reasons which makes sense to your in-group quickly, even if it isn't often grounded in reality. They're quicker to rationalize than understand.
well yes, that is what the word "merely" in the original quote means.
I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.
> It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
You need a combination of both openness and intelligence to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. We don't need to debate whether or not I'm secretly a dolphin.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
A bad idea that is bad on its face is generally benign. Flat earthers have no political or institutional power.
There is more insidious kind of bad idea, like anti-vax philosophy. With these ideas, the layperson doesn't have direct access to comprehensive evidence, the necessary domain complexity exceeds common understanding, human tendency toward suspicious works against you, simple barometers like artificial=bad are useless or harmful, and evidence that seems to support them exists at the margin.
It should be clear that mass social media is causing these bad ideas to proliferate. On the other hard, trying to shut these ideas down through institutional or communal censorship seems to just give them a shot in the arm. Willingness to engage with their proponents shouldn't be seen as tacit support.
That kind of response is exactly why the Rationalists aren't taken seriously.
It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.
asdfman was the one moral grandstanding, I was just being rude
That's another mistake many rationalists make. Viewing other people's well justified moral convictions as "grandstanding."
I'm making valid (if deeply critical) points but you're contributing nothing except your misinformed judgments.
You made no specific point at all.
Grandstanding is a meaningless color commentary term I only reused because I was the one accused of it despite not being the one moralizing.
You can't identify the points that I made? You think you're skilled in rational discussion but can't even do the basic skills required for it?
This is why people don't respect "rationalists." Because people claim to have superior reasoning skills but would fail a freshman survey course on it.
Here are your points. None of them are "specific" points.
"I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas" > "People believe bad things, and I don't like that people engage with them."
"It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate" > "The people who engage with them must also believe the bad things too."
"If someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them." > A nonsensical argument to make about twitter which has a character limit.
What constitutes a "specific" point?
I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
But even if we don't know the underlying reason, they are still valuable by dint of having survived for so long
Things survive for no good reason. It is very common in evolution.
For example, our eyes are wired the wrong way, that is, the optic nerve goes in front of the retina, causing a blind spot and other issues. From a design perspective, it is really stupid and there is no "good" reason why we are like this, it would be like making a monitor with the connectors in front of the display. Octopus eyes are wired the correct way and it works better.
Eyes have evolved like this out of random chance, as an imperfect but functional solution, and we are too advanced for evolution mechanisms to fix the problem now.
> Things survive for no good reason.
And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.
Not knowing an underlying reason isn't the same as denying that reason's existence
I don’t think it’s reasonable. The age of an idea does not imply that it’s true, valuable, or good.
It usually does because other people are also intelligent beings that are usually trying to have a good life and succeed in whatever area they're pursuing. Whatever field it is - earning money, becoming athletic, becoming a musician, becoming a good cook, becoming a good writer or public speaker - there are uncountably many people with a strong desire to succeed in that area and a subset of those that have dedicated their lifes to it.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
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Of course there is tremendous value in many traditions. However, when the world is changing quickly as it is today, it is also very important to check in frequently with reality, to face facts, as it were.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.
> It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
This is not the point, but I’m very confused by the link that is linked as evidence on that line? It doesn’t match the sentence it’s attached to
Link in question: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
Yeah. It's titled "a love song to nicotine" and 80+% of it is about the benefits of nicotine with a claim that "sublingual nicotine’s addictive potential feels low", but TFA links to the tacked-on twitter screenshots at the end. Not the point, but it does make one wonder. Though, to be fair, I only realised that the main body of the article existed when I accidentally scrolled back up "too far". Perhaps the author of TFA received the exact same link and made the same mistake as I initially did.
Dataset of one, but I am struggling to quit sublingual nicotine after using it to quit vaping, which I used to quit smoking. Nicotine in any form is intensely moreish in my view.
It’s not a dataset of one (you’re not alone!), there is a huge corpus of data and nicotine is one of the most addicting substances known to humans. I cringe reading anyone saying “nicotine is great”—because I’ve been there too and it’s literally one of the most devilish things ever.
It’s absolutely addictive, anyone who says otherwise is suspect
What I take issue with is the original sentence saying it’s “bad for you”, I was expecting new science showing that it’s, well, bad for you rather than “just” addictive
Well, it becomes bad for you if you start needing to take so much of it that the other stimulant effects start causing problems, like poor sleep. Most addictive substances have this potential, since "the dose makes the poison". But the same dose forever rarely satisfies cravings forever.
“Just nicotine”/nicotine salts can elevate blood pressure and heart rate which can be very dangerous for some people and long-term bad if not resolved. But by far tobacco smoking is the most physically dangerous which is obviously not the same as “just nicotine”.
Can you recommend some good study about non-smokers who start using nicotine in other forms?
Not studies: Somewhat famously Jessica Simpson got accidentally addicted to nicorette[1]. I heard it as a question in NPR “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” (radio-quiz game show) and it ended up being true.
I’ve known many people who used chewing tobacco and were not smokers.
[1]https://www.dailystar.co.uk/showbiz/simpson-addicted-to-nico...
It is pretty funny that the premise of the article is "silly rationalist bloggers, with their long arguments, links to studies, evidence, debate" and then the "alternative" to that being presented is "here's a link to 4 tweets"
My point is that people, lacking common sense, got themselves addicted to nicotine after reading this blog post. I'm not trying to refute the science here, which would be both far longer of an endeavor and not what my blog post is about.
This means you missed the entire point of the article. The author assumes that you already know that nicotine is bad.
When I think of rationalist blog posts, I think LessWrong and ACX. There is probably more to know. Across 46,000 posts on LW the average word length is 1,300 words as of May 2026. That doesn't seem too bad.
Regarding the varying degree of quality I wanted to note that this is a public forum where anyone is allowed to create an account and post public articles. Anyone is allowed to call themselves a "rationalist" if they want to. I wonder if most who read articles there and post occasionally do label themselves though. I know some who don't.
What about average word length of ACX posts?
Much longer I'm sure, but that's a single author with occasional guest posts. The guest posts are mostly thorough book reviews AFAIK at the moment.
Personally I think the length is often justified by the attention to detail but I must admit I only read some of the classics and a few recent posts when they caught my interest. I even scroll past certain paragraphs if I'm uninterested but I don't mind then being there.
It's also such a mix of things over there. What OP mentioned in particular looked to me like original investigative journalism and those kind of undertakings often enough result in whole books.
Another example which is borderline unreadable is Zvi.
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
This is a particularly weird example. The median post in the "sequences" is less than 1000 words long. The sequences are mostly a long series of individually very short blogposts.
Over a million words is significantly longer than the bible and it's treated as one work:
"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...
One of the things the Bible does particularly well is express ideas succinctly. Yes I know you can pull out exceptions but classically this was interpreted as itself having significance.
Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)
I don’t think that’s what the GP meant.
The Bible is fundamentally a collection of different works. Within those works, I generally agree that the ideas are fairly succinct. But because there are multiple documents in the Bible which cover roughly the same events, it kind of necessarily isn’t succinct as a single cohesive document.
In other words, if you rewrote the Bible as a single document, yeah, it’d be like 10% as long. But that isn’t how it was made.
I’m guessing you haven’t read it in Hebrew because the Hebrew is pretty succinct.
As for meandering, the narrative follows people who travel around to different places so I don’t know what you mean. The canon of the Bible doesn’t arrange all the books chronologically. You can read them in chronological order if you want.
The canon doesn't even arrange all the books. It's a somewhat arbitrary selection.
If we start with Genesis, we get the creation story twice. We get two instances of dude pretending his wife is his sister.
You just used the word “we” 3 times which is even more than 2. Why be so redundant?
presumably this is somewhat analogous to telling the newbie to go and fetch the tartan paint, or pedal powered wheelchair and the like.
More of a go away and do this thing that will take a long time because we don't want to deal with you at the moment?
His weirdo Harry Potter fanfic is 600,000 words long, which is the combined length of the first five real harry Potter books.
Wait... Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky? So that means he wrote that totally straight and its not a joke?
It’s real. The excessive length is one of several things that serves as a filter. Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end. It even includes completely unnecessary uncomfortable parts like the rape threat sequence which further filter out all but the true believers.
The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.
Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.
> Anyone dedicated enough to get through it is a believer by the end.
Got through the end, not a believer in anything. Not only your statement is wrong (because most absolute statements are) even the weakened statement of most who finished are believers is likely wrong because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
> The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual.
I have read way worse btw.
> because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
The parts I read were basically Yudkowsky doing a self-insert into the book and trying to dress rationalist lecturing up with Harry Potter themes.
> I have read way worse btw.
That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
> Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
Believe as you wish but I found about it through r/HPfanfiction.
> That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
It is a fanfiction, you shouldn't expect a good published book level writing. Sturgeon's law apply very strongly to fanfiction.
My Immortal?
No, Brockton's Celestial Forge for example, a true masterpiece in excessive verbosity and meandering writing which makes The Silmarillion look like a riveting and concise short novel.
Yeah, it also suffers from the over-powered protagonist trope found in a lot of fanfics. It has good elements (of what I've read thus far). I think the story could have been better if it focused on a few crossovers and technologies instead of going "here's a completely unrelated power/ability from a new setting", but the premise (earning rewards for writing that result in random abilities from different franchises) doesn't really lend itself to that.
Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.
To the author credit I remember the 40k words climax sequence of confronting March was really good and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.
The Silmarillion is riveting and concise! I will grant that it's not a novel.
A fanfiction where the author gives the main character good boy points for writing more words is kind of the extreme end of this, though. Web serials and fanfiction tend to be overly verbose and meandering, and the Methods of Rationality is very much on the less verbose side of them, but by the standards of traditionally published fantasy and sci-fi it is wordslop.
Another PoV - it was just one weird-premises HP fanfic, in a world containing literally millions of weird-premise HP fanfics. If you felt that your only options with it were (1) read every word, in order, and (2) stop reading it entirely - that is your reading style, and your choice. Other folks may chose to peek at the ending first, skip over the parts they don't like, go back later to read one of the dreary & long-winded part that they realized was plot-relevant, or whatever. They may skip back and forth between reading HPMOR and reading some steamy superhero fanfic with a Batman/Spiderman romantic pairing - that is set on a jungle-style Venus, in the 1890's.
I was totally enjoying it. If you think that everyone needs to grit through it, as an initiation ritual, no less... The sneer club, I presume?
> The sneer club, I presume?
No. My exposure to HPMOR was a very long time ago from an eccentric coworker and his friends who tried to get me to read it. I curiously read a little bit and couldn’t believe people were taking it seriously.
Then I Googled it and found lively discussions from rationalists bending over backward to defend the part of HPMOR where Draco says he’s going to rape someone, and noped right out of that entire subgenre of the internet for years.
I do think it’s fascinating how the rationalists are so unwilling to accept that people may not resonate with their material that everyone who disagrees is assumed to be part of an ideological outgroup with bad intentions. Sneer Club is a tiny subreddit that appears basically inactive?
Why would you presume that the only way for someone to dislike HPMOR is to be indoctrinated by a tiny subreddit instead of having their own opinion? I suppose it tracks that rationalists would view ideologies as being sourced from groups and communities and look for group membership to assign someone’s opinion to, rather than accepting that someone might be able to form their own independent opinions.
You go far further than "to dislike HPMOR". You make sweeping generalizations about the readers. "Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too."
You either dedicated quite a lot of effort to somehow get this statistic (unlikely), or make things up, or acquired the attitude from a place that was quite active at the time.
I felt I could make a single guess about a single person.
As a perseverer, I can confirm it was a waste of time and, functionally, a poorly-written demonstrative exercise on the abuse of rhetoric to disabuse others of their beliefs, dignity and agency. Imagine my surprise when I found out about the cult stuff.
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Should've said "'disabuse'" but even without its still kinda my point: I don't think it's right to aggressively pursue and dismantle others worldviews if they're doing ok, even if they're a bit wrong. Functionally you're just chipping at their morale and replacing their shit with your only slightly less wrong shit anyway, so it's ultimately more about coercion and control.
Aggressively dismantling other (and their own!) worldviews is how we've got Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment, among other things.
There's an enormous chasm between Socrates & Rousseau, and Yudkowsky and co.
I know nothing about Yudkowsky, I think I read like 10 of his words in total over the course of my life. I was commenting on the general principle of aggressively dismantling every worldview all the time. I think it isn't just a good thing to do, it's the only way to arrive at a worldview that actually holds together.
If you meant Yudkowsky and co. are doing the aggressive dismantling wrong, or aren't dismantling their own views aggressively enough - that's fair, I have zero knowledge on the subject and would love to hear more. But if you mean that aggressive dismantling is wrong in and of itself, I think it's totally fair to bring Socrates and Rousseau into the discussion.
Think of it more like: you walk up to someone leaving a church and "socratically dismantle" their worldview by listing their thinking errors. If you actually manage to, you then go and inject your own ideas as to "how it all really works". If they listen to you and now need you for counsel, are they better off?
The socratic dialogues and enlightenment debates are generally taken up by engaged participants (else the dialogues would be quite short eh?) and aim at the idea of revealing truth through questions, or tackling fundamentally interesting ideas.
The dialogues in HPMOR are most often "you're so, so wrong because your mind is defective and clouded by this list of 30 erroneous thinking patterns. Let me elaborate for 10 minutes about why you're a blind fool and I'm a genius who sees the truth".
The pattern is very different and I think characterising what's done in HPMOR, and what's in greek or enlightenment philosophy is a bad idea.
There are good rationalist writers but Yudkowsky is not the one to look at.
Yudkowsky doesn't stand at your place of worship waiting for you to come out. You have to actively reach out, look him up and open his posts to see a single word of what he's saying. At that point, he's the host and you're the guest; if you came to him to read his posts, it's not a fair complaint that you're exposed to his opinions, even if his opinions are critical your own opinions. It's more akin to being a Jehovah's witness, knocking on an atheist's door, asking them to talk about Jesus, and being mad when they say the Gospel was made up. It would be very rude to say at a church, but they're not at a church, they're at his home.
I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky aims at revealing truth through questions and tackling interesting ideas too, at least in his head. Maybe his questions are wrong or his idea of interesting is wrong, and that would be a valid criticism, but it's a completely different argument than that he shouldn't be asking any questions in the first place.
As far as I know, HPMOR is meant to be a parody, not a serious discourse. It's unfair to judge it like a serious discourse. His blog posts, sure, we should judge them by the serious standards, because AFAIK they're absolutely serious.
> Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club
Are you sure “cool” is the correct adjective?
I read it for a while, when it first got published. It started very strong (first several chapters), then was weird and refularly was giving me vibes of Atlas Shrugged.
Then author got his diva moment, at least this is how I remember it. He constructed some impossible to solve situation and had tantrum that if readers won’t give answer how one of protagonists will solve it, author will stop writing the book. I think it had even time limit for readers.
After that I dropped the book and never returned to it.
That is a interesting take! I think the ultimatium was that readers had to guess the solution to get the best ending.
Most fans loved that challenge. We're you worried? Angry? Either way you just had to wait for the next installment.
Strange that you dont remember that the protagonist was the titular Harry Potter.
Not worried, not angry. As I said - I felt that this is diva moment and I don't want to entertain such narcissism.
I tried to remember who was challenged, but I wasn't sure and my main candidate now was Snape.
why do you think you took it as offensive diva-ing, rather than something else? I ask because that seems to be a unique reaction.
Quite a feat to drop a book at the very end of it.
Must stand by my principles, lol
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That's correct. Harry Potter fanfic is a huge part of the rationalist movement, the Zizians, and more. Behind the Bastards' episodes on the Zizians do a fairly well-cited dive into it.
It's a recruitment tool.
Personally, it’s my favorite book and I consider it better than the original series (although the original series is a hard prerequisite).
However, I wouldn’t call it “long” in the same way that I wouldn’t call The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations long. Serialized stories are just naturally longer because readers want a sizable chunk every week/month, regardless of that inflating the total size or not.
I have not read nor heard of this, but umm, its fanfic. People write fanfic because they enjoy the world of the story and want more of it. Why would it be a surprise that a fanfic is overly long and verbose? I'd assume that just goes with the territory.
I think you should look into what it is. It's not "just a fanfic", it is considered a foundational text for the Rationalist movement.
It's not just relevant because Yudkowsky wrote it, it's relevant because it essentially serves as Rationalism's "Torah".
So we have Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and the dude who wrote a Harry Potter fanfic.
Is it perhaps possible one of these is not like the others?
I'd be interested to see some evidence that it's "considered a foundational text" or is treated in anything like the way that observant Jews treat the Torah.
As one who has lurked in Rationalist corners of the web and learned useful things there without ever really buying in, I can confirm it really is treated rather like a holy text.
I've seen Rationalists defend it against very fair and accurate criticisms (see this whole thread for some of those), completely failing to recognize the complaints and objections are often legitimate.
I believe I've seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the Rationalist community.
It's not uncommon to see people quote it in varying capacities - as a reminder of what "good rationality" looks like, as a cultural shibboleth, as a criticism of an idea they disagree with, and more. As an ex-evangelical who's read the Protestant Bible well over five times, this behavioral pattern looks very, very familiar.
I'm not going to spend the hours digging to find actual evidence I'm correct, and it's possible I'm being unfair and misremembering. I'm just a guy on the Internet - don't take this as anything other than "Here's my recollection. Take it for what it's worth."
The label of "Torah" did not strike me as wrong, though.
I've definitely seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the rationalist community, but that's very different from treating it as a holy text.
The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.
I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.
It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".
Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.
Its almost like they are major fans of the book, right. Similar to atlas shrugged which also had a ideological theme.
I guess it's really less like the Torah and more like Dianetics.
Just like with L Ron Hubbard's work being a foundation for Scientology.
> enjoy the world of the story
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic. In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this. You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
Critique and analysis is often something done out of love.
You’d have a point if it was longer lol
Besides there are other HP fan fics in this range
Other HP fanfics aren't foundational texts for a worryingly influential pseudo-philosophical movement.
be the change you want to see in the world
Violence is not the answer
> Violence is not the answer
Sometimes it is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
My Immortal is a foundational text for tumblr.
It isn’t really helping beat the allegations here that multiple people are trying to disprove the author’s argument with crappy math. Ok, how many of those posts are Grand Thoughts like the author is actually talking about and what is the average length of those? How about the median? Are there a bunch of “Decided to cut my hair today” tweet style posts mixed in with the Thousand and One Commandments?
It takes skill and effort to condense knowledge.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
> I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
>I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
I don't understand how you're parsing that quote as "cannot".
That sounds like a different way of saying that wall of texts with low signal are produced by low skill and low effort users...
Which, TBH, matches the clear majority of AI boosters.
so that's why Claude is so verbose
In Scott Alexander's case, it's because he's into ideas (e.g., eugenics) that most people find reprehensible, so he has to couch them in a lot of bullshit to make them more palatable, and to give himself some credibility.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander
That link is unlikely to be an unbiased accounting.
Speaking of long-winded rationalist blog posts, the evidence for that claim is this long, detailed, full-of-receipts accounting of David Gerard's use of RationalWiki (though mostly Wikipedia) to push his personal agenda in subtle ways while scrupulously following the rules to avoid being caught at it:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
IME they're usually the first thing you see when you get to the comments, so the really long essays are possibly a way to bore people into not getting to the comment section.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start or broadening their philosophical background beyond the collection of texts popular within their subculture.
Personally i think the world would be a better place if more of us added nuance to our arguments.
The problem part in that quote is “rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start”, not that they’re including nuance. Nuance can be a value add or it can be a distraction. It is not by itself virtuous.
The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.
The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.
Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
I don't know, I think rationalist bloggers tend to love arguing, and if you identified some assumption that they didn't address they'd just as happily write 50,000 words on that instead. :-)
I think he just used nuance as a polite way to say meandering.
Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.
Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.
How would it make it much better? Can you give me a nuanced argument and one that isn't nuanced so I can agree with you?
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To a degree I think it comes with the rational approach. If you want to be a rationalist, you need to consider many perspectives, and somehow bring in the nuance of as many of them as possible instead of ignoring the parts that don't fit your narrative. It's very easy to be brief with one-sided takes, but nuance is boring and lengthy. That of course doesn't mean that the authors conclusions and arguments will be correct in the end.
While I agree with the author’s main argument, it seems weird to single out a blog post (the one from Scott Alexander) whose title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know” as being too long. I mean of course it is! It’s right there in the title!
That blog post is explicitly targeted at people who are looking for a nice calm evening of reading about a super weird “way out there” subject. It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
It’s a bit like complaining that the “1 pound hangover beater” hamburger at your local grease diner has too many calories.
> title includes “Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
This would be a fair complaint if it couldn’t also serve as a valid subtitle to the entire blog itself and not just a post. Admitting it in the title does not undermine the OP’s point about trying to obscure a poorly-framed argument.
My take from the OP was almost immediately, “Oh yeah, they never read Aquinas, et al”. Clearly that too comes from a fixed viewpoint, my particular Western Classics-style education delivered via US Catholic schools in the ‘80s, but I think there is a lot more honesty in any of old Tommy’s Proofs of God. You may agree or disagree with them, but pretty much anyone without any particular background or prior reading can immediately engage with them whereas the rationalists are doing all this navel gazing, or possibly glazing, around their feeling to make it so you cannot disagree because it’s set up to be a game of manners rather (have you read my other source I cited? How can you say that without reading this other link?) than an argument.
> It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
Part of the author's argument is that it doesn't do a good job of arguing at all, let alone quickly and effectively. It just inundates you with so many words and "facts" that people get bowled over by how "smart" it sounds.
Yeah but that doesn’t not make it a super weird example. It makes me wonder where else the author is not writing in good faith.
> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
> I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
Wow, it is amazing to me that there is a wikipedia page about people who read Scott Alexander's blog. Still, it is (or was) a darn good blog back in the day.
In UX, if it needs a long on-boarding, you probably messed up.
If it's so rational, why does it need to be over-explained?
I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.
Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.
You cannot claim that your search for knowledge is deep while simultaneously dismissing most previous work on the topic. In the rationalists case they have little knowledge of historical and contemporary philosophy.
Because they know that quantity is a substitute for quality. If you write enough words about something, no matter how nonsensical your actual arguments are, people tend to assume you know what you are talking about. If someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments you just say "well you aren't addressing all my other arguments"
It's gish gallop
It's autistic / adhd hyperverbosity. Rationalists are a social group of neurodiverse people and attract neurodiverse people as a result.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
Autism is often associated with bottoms-up communication, start with the details, then the big picture will emerge. I.e., https://autisticphd.com/theblog/what-is-bottom-up-thinking-i...
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
Exactly!
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
The issue is that you've got to build shared context before people can follow an unstructured dump of everything in your brain. You have to tell a story that makes sense. Also, ideally you figure out how to filter out the stuff that other people simply don't need to know. It is not easy, but it is a skill you can learn.
How ND of you! There is a difference because the when the ND person misses the mark they get reactions of confusion. What you're talking about has a huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
You are also missing the point, being ND doesn't mean you are hyper verbose, always. This overall sour grapes about how NTs have social instincts is a typical development of autistic people over the years, which you are also exhibiting.
It's not an accusation, but a mirror to help them potentially realize something, so they don't suffer so much through life so. When you realize what is happening, it helps release a lot of suffering in a person's life. The sour grapes is not helpful, NT social instincts are not going away and it's better to understand and work with the world than to be upset that rain happens sometimes and it just should never exist!
NT social instincts does not mean the person is super effective socially and everything else, but it's a very useful tool if they decide to develop their social skills.
What's the relationship between social skills and the truth?
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
Autistic misunderstand each other as much as they misunderatand neurotypical people.
eh?
I have ADHD and I tend to be the total opposite
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this topic earlier today. It seems that we train students to write in the worst way possible, by giving arbitrary word counts as benchmark for completeness.
I suppose letting students turn in 3 sentence essays may not be a better option, but it at least it doesn't encourage students who engage with the assignment in good faith to turn a high-quality six paragraphs into six pages.
Having a well-defined rubric is better than having a minimum word count or page count. If they can meet all the rubric's requirements in 3 sentences then so be it.
The alternative is to "turn in a good paper" which is not quantifiable and thus anathema to the modern Taylorism inspired world of education. If the student can't agree, it's a problem and so word count it is - can't argue with basic math.
There are still unquantifiable aspects of grading. Just turning in 1000 words or whatever doesn't guarantee an A, it's a bare minimum in a still-mostly-unquantifiable grading system.
Grading in writing has always felt nonsensical to me. When I didn't get a perfect score in math, the teacher could point out what I did wrong and how I would have been able to do it right.
None of the people grading my writing ever even attempted to do that. The grade existed separately from my writing and served no purpose of education.
I once turned in a five sentence essay that covered about a single page. The person next to me in class turned in five pages, but ultimately got the same grade as me. That's when I realized how stupid it all was.
Agreed. I scored a 4/6 and 8/12 on my SAT and GRE essay sections, barely above average, despite:
- 99+ percentile scores on the multiple choice sections
- winning multiple essay contests in middle school and high school
I have the worst handwriting of anyone I know and sometimes wonder if that influenced the scores.
Most of the time the benchmark word count isn't any more than six paragraphs to begin with. And putting out more words means more practice, which is valuable in a school setting.
A lot of times, it feels like reading the Talmud.
First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")
Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.
Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.
It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.
Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.
Philosophy also tends to rattle on. I think part of it is that if the ideas are not that strong and seem obvious or wrong if stated briefly you can make it look more significant by lengthening up.
See Hobbes, Calvin https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...
A lot of academics are bad writers, philosophers included. In my opinion, philosophy is actually far from the worst offender. If you read philosophers who are good at writing and actually have something to say (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf) they can be short and illuminating.
By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.
Or there is a lot of nuance and long history of arguments behind concepts like free will, consciousness, realism, emergence. You can't simplify the arguments without glossing over a lot of detail. Philosophers prattle on because they're responding to all that. They're aware of the various objections to their position.
Yes, a lot of pieces just aren't written for beginners, they are part of an ongoing and voluminous discourse. Writing something short just wouldn't be very interesting (for the experts), they want to engage with all of the prior art.
I think that when references to the prior work are only implicit, pieces tend to be nearly unreadable for casual readers.
However, when interesting counter arguments are stated explicitly, the long articles can still be kind of fun, and personally think this is something Scott Alexander does pretty well, for instance. He is not the main offender of unreadable long rationalist blog posts, of which there are many.
I guess with something like consciousness you get a lot of so and so said this and that guy said that but I where I think they went wrong is this point. I've yet to find it very illuminating when it goes much beyond scientific observation though.
I have a theory the best philosophy can be stated simply and briefly. Like with consciousness Nagel asking what it's like to be a bat is an interesting idea but you don't need hundreds of pages to explain it.
So that's where Claude's verbosity comes from.
Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).
No one likes Claudisms, especially people who write a lot. The AI cliches are nearly unbearable. However no one has quite figured out how to fix it.
They use automated graders now. It's more likely the communication style was rewarded by overly strict grading rubrics.
(ie "honest caveats" wording comes from a reward for being honest about drawbacks instead of covering them up)
Note Opus 5.5 is much less likely to do it.
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
So the length is load-bearing?
I've been reading stuff from the rationalist community for a long time. Here's some related comments that might be helpful:
* Writing to think -- writing about a subject to understand it better -- is a common technique in online rationalist circles
* I often just throw long (esp rationalist) essays at my LLM text summarizer script to see if they would be something I'd like to read. It works well for me
* Rationalism the subculture, rationalism the skill, rationalism the subject, rationalism the mindset, etc, all seem pretty distinct. This comment is more for the comments here (mftch)
* Inducing a trait from a few examples to a whole group (esp a long tailed (ie diverse) group) is usually a bad idea. Exposure is often a good remedy for that. (mftch)
* It might just be me, but it seems that both the online rationalist community and hacker news comments cultures have evolved a lot in the last few years (mftch)
mftch?
As a philosophy major, I can confirm that the field generally rewards those who make good arguments for bad ideas, and that for reasons that I never fully understood, texts always seem to be far more verbose than necessary.
It's pretty remarkable to see 'I don't like them, therefore their arguments are all terrible' in action, but it's so rampant in this comments section it's genuinely sad. Every single argument against rationalists can be leveraged at academic philosophers too.
Sign of the times.
"Back in my day", HN felt more signal than noise. Oh there was flaming and name calling, but there was a lot less of what you point out: simple outgroup dunking.
Yeah this was one of the stupidest comment sections I've read on this site in recent memory, and these days the commentary here is definitely not high-brow. Most of the comments were just "I don't like rationalists so they're stupid." I think there's plenty of very obvious, fertile critique one can make against rationalists but there's so little of that here in this comments section that it makes me quite sad.
The author doesn't seem to have considered that this might just be a matter of taste.
I personally find this kind of overly verbose blog post enjoyable to read (even when, as in the case of Scott Alexander and the internet rationalists, I disagree with a lot of the substance).
Same reason I like A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Admiral Cloudberg, Perun (Youtube), and various other long form content blogs and channels. These could all get to the point much faster, but that's not what they're trying to do.
For me - the nerdy deep dive + relatively low information density + analytical style makes for a pleasurable reading / watching experience.
Longer = more important
Also most people on lesswrong are likely on the spectrum and are used to needing to overexplain themselves because neurotypical people rarely give them the benefit of the doubt.
Good writing takes effort.
Clarity - grace - style ... is not taught. Passable text is good enough.
No editor - plus a peer group who create bloated text.
Here is my favorite text on how to write clearly: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Ten-Lessons-Clarity-Grace/dp/03...
I really hope good writing makes a comeback. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time and effort to write well.
That really is a fine book, it brings back good memories.
However, I don't think this article is really complaining about style. Scott Alexander has great style, the clarity/grace people would find much to love about him.
The complaint is about the length of his writing, and the content, ie focusing on endless arguments as opposed to honoring prior traditions.
From the article:
The first sentence is a link to the Gwern essay, which does indeed have over 100 references and is rigorously argued and appropriately caveated.The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
> The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
That's a complete cop-out then.
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
It would have taken 10 seconds to put a bit right at the top that says 'do not see this article as an excuse to go smoke or vape' or maybe even something harsher than that. With great power etc ...
Most countries have laws that tax all tobacco sales and direct those proceeds into public education campaigns that warn of the dangers of nicotine. These are multi-million-dollar PR campaigns; I like gwern’s essays but they don’t stand a chance against that level of background radiation. A normal person essentially cannot be convinced that nicotine is safe.
Yes, I hate to admit I am/was someone that assumed nicotine is bad, but Gwern's article is fascinating and well researched. This was a poor hill to die on for this article.
No nicotine is actually basically bad. Basically all the scientific evidence we have on nicotine products is that it’s bad and addictive. It is a stimulant though, which means it can, potentially, help people with conditions like ADHD. But then again, we have real medicine for those, that we know works.
All the people who think nicotine is not that bad have clearly not used it long enough, and aren’t addicted enough. There does come a point where it will feel like your bones are trying to escape your body when you dare relinquish from nicotine. Then, it will be clear it is bad.
If there are any doubts nicotine is bad, simply ask nicotine users. And by that I mean, not the people who used Zyn once or twice to study for an exam.
It's like cocaine. It is bad, no doubt. It is also a stimulant. If Gwern had written about cocaine instead of nicotine it would have likely gotten a different reception, but it actually would have been roughly the same kind of article.
I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.
(To clarify the Gwernpost, nicotine isn't primarily addictive but habit forming. So for instance if you get your nicotine from cigarettes you end up habituated to smoking cigs, and so on. But you can use it to habituate to anything else as well.)
Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.
> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.
Mm, of course, the already-too-long and too-heavily-referenced essay just needed to be longer and more referenced, then it would count as Science, which would give it the standing to be allowed to challenge those two tweets.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.
I don't know if nicotine is good for you, but I've enjoyed all the parodies at https://morewrong.lol/
This is an amazing site
> Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund
https://morewrong.lol/?post=pascals-mugging-college-fund
u/orf
That was the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I laughed so much.
Thank you for sharing.
Hehe, that got a chuckle out of me, it's a bit like that HN parody site.
That has some serious n-gate vibes (http://n-gate.com/)
I miss n-gate :(
for what is worth, rationalists I know love this stie and see it little different than lesswrong. They are just as happy to read and debate:
"Earning to Give and the Case for My Drinking Problem" or "Gay Son or Thot Daughter: A Decision-Theoretic Treatment"
it is about love of the game
I’m an avid less wrong reader, but this is incredible
How come I hadn't already seen that? Thank you.
[dead]
A lot of rationalists seem to believe that prolixity is a sign of intellectual effort.
The verbosity of the entire post can be condensed down to just this bit:
> verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness
Clearly OP author is far too wordy as well!
I don't think its just rationalist blogs who do this. Authors don't realise how little time people have now and catching anyone's attention is a miracle. These examples for the nicotine aren't the best though. Gwern's articles are long because he includes literally every thing he can possibly find on a subject. They're not meant to be like short summaries but more like evolving wikipedia articles.
If you read what gwern says on nicotine its far more nuanced than "nicotine is fine, use nicotine." He does acknowledge that frequent use leads to tolerance. But tolerance is not the same as addiction. I think also if you're going to try argue against his post (which is thoroughly researched) then you ought to do better than just set up a strawman and say he's wrong....
I’m not trying to argue against his post. If I was, I would devote more than two sentences to it. I’m trying to argue that it’s too long
Because a defining feature of those people is confusing the appearance of seriousness with seriousness itself, just like they confuse their ideological preference with rationality.
> blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive
following the link:
> My take away is that there is addiction
At least thanks for writing a short blog post!
I love the rationalist blogosphere but agree with this 100%. I was actually having a very similar thought this morning (specifically about the book reviews in the ACX contest and how they seem to keep getting longer).
This is embarrassing, I studied philosophy and worked as a researcher in the discipline for more than 20 years, and I've never heard of "rationalist blogs." Of course, I know what "rationalism" would be as an old philosophical tradition. I also call myself an anti-irrationalist (which is different from rationalism in the sense I know).
Can someone explain to me what "rationalist blogs" and the "rationalists" behind them are? (Of course, I could use Google but I'd like to tap into HN's crowd intelligence in this case.)
Community of people that orbit around LessWrong and a list of bloggers that have some weird ideas about reality. The reason they are "important" is that lots of SV/bay are engineers are into rationalism, and believe some things about AI because they consider themselves rationalists
Expressing yourself succinctly takes both intelligence and courage.
The idiot rambles on and the coward hides behind a wall of text that would be exhausting to refute.
We are all one or the other occasionally.
A problem with long articles is there are so many important topics to be informed about today, and if I spend an hour on one, then I don't have time for others.
I think it comes from their culture "growing up" in hostile parts of the internet (twitter, Reddit, HN, etc) and so having to hedge every statement with excruciating delineation of edge cases and precise scoping lest some sneering POS leave drive by comments that twist their words into some straw man that the local majority will be against.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a group signaling mechanism.
I'm not being funny, but how do you expect to find a receptive audience for your belief system when you apparently write off a variety of audiences as 'sneering POSs' who are out to get you from the start?
Tbf the people who are against rationalists describe themselves as sneering. See r/sneerclub
First off, it's not my belief system. I'm not a rationalist.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
i think there is room for word vomit overexplaining every little nuance, detail, and caveat as a style of writing especially if one is trying to be through and “rational”, but I think it takes much more skill to condense the meat of a subject
Can condensation convince people believing the opposite?
I think it's pretty simple. To prioritize concision, you need to value other people's time more than stroking your own ego. A lot of "rationalists" are just people who, more than anything else, think they are smarter than other people and desperately need to prove it. This naturally means they don't respect other people's time and it naturally leads to voluminous prose.
I’m not sure what this “rationalist” thing is but I think almost every blog entry is too long. Half the posts on this site are too long, get to the point. I have actual books to read by people that wrote their works 100 years ago, why would I spend an hour reading something that was written in San Francisco last week?
On an internet where almost every atypical person can find a niche to fit their oddities, rationalism is one of the bubbles for people who are strongly inclined toward (and have the time for) very long, clever-sounding essays. Pretty much everything else is downstream of that bias, so there's no real prospect of improvement.
Because they need to rationalize everything.
As one young philosopher put it, wisdom is a moral choice. It is a decision to only speak about what you truly know; and that is very little. E. g. most of us do not truly know the Earth is a sphere; we only "know" this from a hearsay and that is not it.
What irks me the most about rationalists is their inability to acknowledge their own biases. The nicotine article linked was a series of citations linked by some commentary in between where the author immediately dismissed any sources that opposed their beliefs while backing their points with studies that had the same or worse methodological issues. A bit too much nitpicking to my taste, and a bit too much reliance on hiding behind seemingly scientific language.
Because a short, precise conclusion would only give you negative feedbacks. Too many viewers and critics jump to argument without much thinking.
Writing in defensive style is a tactical choice.
Assuming I am a rationalist (I honestly don't like this word, it's more of a self-identifying label; if not it is just saying something really trivial. But yet these people, probably only on LW, decide to call them so, so let's use that word) and is writing to others on this forum, I would assume that they have the same mindset and peer review standard as mine, so I would not write with defensive mindset emphasized.
The rationalist community seems great at rationalizing their bias, not at rational or critical thought. They will argue their way into anything - but that makes them good debaters or writers, not good thinkers.
Some arguments about future predictions seem like a sci-fi fan base nerding about their favorite stories, but without any self awareness.
You get a nerds wet dream: nerdy stuff and ego boost. But very detached from reality.
> It turns out nicotine is addictive and bad for you
links to a substack post confirming the benefits Gwern wrote about, and acknowledging the risks Gwern acknowledged
Probably not universally true, but good writing is a skill regardless.
And maybe they are "too long" in the same way that Lean proofs are "too long"? I have no idea - I don't read either very often.
However, often I don't care how verbose a piece is if it can hold my interest. For example, the late Umberto Eco wrote some of my favourite pieces. He was a philosopher (among other things), and many of them - notably of the "post-modern" - are known to be particularly verbose.
Here's a particularly relevant one: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
There is the effect that it takes more words to say something new in a way that is convincing than to say something your audience already believes.
Any movement that names themselves after how right they are is suspect.
Similarly movements who use catchphrases for this, like when Kier Starmers centrist version of Labour started calling themselves "the adults in the room" - it gave away their entitlement to lead.
"Rationalists" can't be wrong - it's in the name, any one disagreeing is just irrational.
Rationalists change their position when being shown to be wrong. To err is human, after all. But to insist on your original wrong position is irrational.
While notionally my interests align very well with lesswrong, I am seldom able to make it through the length of a post without losing interest.
They are insecure and want to appear smart, and think long writing == smart.
To be contrarian isn't to be a "free thinker", it's to be led around like a dog on a leash. You're just a reactionary saying the opposite of an actual opinion.
If I had to wager, I'd say both of those points stem from being bullied in school more often than not.
the same reason a greasy used car salesman goes on an on and on.
> It seems to me that, in this community, verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness...
Not only in that community. I see it a lot at my job too, waffling and loudness as a substitute for knowledge, skill and diligence. I think maybe plato wrote something about this in the gorgias
It's a thing called logorrhea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhea
Logorrhea is a symptom of ADHD, schizophrenia and traumatic brain injuries.
I wish there was a much greater stigma against providing unsolicited, almost certainly non-professional medical diagnoses of third parties like you have done.
Whatever the faults of internet rationalists, suggesting that they have a mental health disorder is incredibly anti-social behaviour.
I didn't provide a diagnosis, I pointed out that this was a symptom shared by multiple medical conditions. The difference may seem small but it is nonetheless crucial.
Also if I wasn't incredibly anti-social, I wouldn't be on this site in the first place.
Alternatively the question is why the author of that opinion piece has nothing more to say.
Not as long as the sales pages for e-books.
They just keep going on and on. I wondered why. I think it's because at every point, the person either stopped and bought, or... they're still reading so... you may as well hit them with MOAR and MOAR!
I think rationalist blogs are often useful for self improvement. It's like a lot of religious thought, if you take it too seriously you'll go insane but in small doses it makes you better
Because r >> g. These people don't need to work and need to find some outlet for their efforts since the labor market cannot compete with their current investment returns.
Because, although the arguments might make sense in an abstract, detached way, they're very often against 'gut feel', and for good reason.
Therefore they use a kickstarter or aliexpress style torrent of argument and features to try to cudgel you into agreement.
I don't think you can ever identify why someone is going to prattle on for days on a topic. Could be they're trying to convince themselves as much as those around them.
If we buy information by paying in reading time, the ideal deal would be maximum information for no reading time.
Sounds unachievable? Doesn't mean we shouldn't go there!
are you really asking? modafinil.
A big part of this will be in-group signalling. Humans always do this, starting at the school playground. They adopt the habits of what they consider to be their in-group. It is why so much of the material (blogs, essays, comments on blogs, etc) come across as infuriating to the average reader.
In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.
(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).
> Eliezer Yudkowsky's "sequences" are over one million words long.
The sequences are really books made up of chapters (blog posts). Most of those posts are relatively short.
They are also very repetitive. When I started reading it (back in 2015 I think?) I thought that they had some interesting info, but needed a good editor to remove at least 60% of the material; many chapters argued the exact same point as the previous chapter, with a slightly different analogy. Also many are responses to other blogs of the time, which also isn't interesting to read in a book since you don't have any context. Very tiresome to read.
Many posts/chapters are written to be understood individually, so they overlap but with different emphasis. They are made to be skippable.
It’s not getting better with AI. I’m 100% with the author on wisdom. LLMs don’t seem much to exhibit the benefit of experience in their outputs
Because it's difficult to condescend a little, especially when you're smarter than everyone else.
The reason all the rationalist posts are so long is that they are on drugs. Nootropics.
It’s because the point isn’t actually to convey the idea
It’s to do the practice of rationalist blogging
TLDR: Because reality is way more complex than any of its representations.
--
If person rationalist they
> prioritizes explicit reasoning, logic, and evidence over intuition, tradition, or emotion.
By sticking to this principle one has to describe every cause-effect, every idea from their speech. Reality is way more complex and detailed than any of it's representations. So rationalist can keep detailing and grounding everything they touch in their speech, and then ground grounds and so on. Sticking to rationalist values you have to write more and ground more.
By cutting corners of explanation and reason rationalist's claims they becoming less rationalist and less acceptable by the group, thus less popular. So the more you're rationalist, more popular you are more you have to write. It's natural way of things.
--
Irinically the complete rationalism isn't achievable because Gödel's incompleteness teorem.
> There will always be true statements about symbols that the system can write down, but cannot prove or disprove using its own rules.
They, we all have to draw a logical/grounding line somewhere, either by choice either by incapacity.
Most blog posts could be a tweet.
Tweets aren't great for citing sources, two links and you hit the word limit.
Pharmaceutical stimulant/eugeroic use is one contributing factor.
Why do americans insist on using philosophical terminology to mean its opposite?
I think it's just the blog version of gish gallop. They just say a bunch of stuff that sounds smart to people who don't have much knowledge in certain areas, so much that it'll take too much effort to rebut, in hopes that you stop thinking about it and just accept their arguments. I only just heard of that Eliezer Yudkowsky guy the other day, and when I looked him up I stumbled upon a reddit thread where he makes a fool of himself talking about probabilities. So I wouldn't trust a single thing that guy says. https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm...
Also I think the name "Rationalist" is kinda funny. Reminds me of that Antifa meme, "we're the anti bad guy squad, and our opponents are the bad guys! Everything we do is justified because we fight bad guys obviously!" Except these guys are the Rationalists. Everything they do is rational, and if you don't agree with them, then you're irrational obviously.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Yarvin is about as anti-rationalist as you can get.
Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and adds weight to the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.
It’s another red flag. I don’t read “rationalist” blog posts but I’ve seen verbosity before. It’s a pseudo-intellectual effect. It’s a kind of propaganda method. You talk and write very long and convoluted. No one really understands you but they assume you know what you’re talking about and tend to buy what you sell. Of course this requires a “community” praising the person who talks a lot. Otherwise no one would read/listen to them.
I’ve seen this tactic in politics and media, to sway public opinion (into something against public’s interest and against basic common sense). I’ve seen with charismatic leaders and followers of religious cults. They talk a lot, write thick books but say little of value. I’ve seen this with people selling Ponzi schemes.
I think the common theme is they have to go against the common sense and have to weaken defense mechanisms of the target. But they have no real arguments that can be summarized clearly in a few sentences. Such arguments would be easy to understand and refute.
Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones.
There's also rhetorical advantage in spewing so much stuff that you snow your reader under a blizzard; what's worse, some of that tends to be true.
This is true. The Preacher says,
“Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly (some translations "as his folly deserves"), lest he be wise in his own eyes." - Proverbs 26:4,5
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
That's exactly it.
I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.
why lot word when few word do trick?
this should be a rule for everyone but the finest wielders of language.
It's called the bullshit firehose. It's designed to make you give up arguing, because who has the time? Unfortunately, naturally trusting people are often ensnared.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Found what's going on my gravestone.
There's a shorter word for that: chutzpah.
they get paid by the word
Because they have autism
I'll give you a hint: the truth is usually very simple.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.
Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.
The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.
But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)
You should join lesswrong.
Cocaine is bad. So is nicotine. Because on balance they are bad, even if they have good properties. You can spend 30K words on 'the good sides' but on balance they are still bad.
"On balance they are still bad" is a statement that one justifies by actually comparing the good and bad properties. It seems pretty clear (though I could be wrong!) that for cocaine the bad outweighs the good. It's less obvious for nicotine or, to name another legal stimulant drug, caffeine.
But apparently spending 30k words trying to explore the tradeoff is a bad thing? Because it should just be obvious that Nicotine Is Bad on balance, without weighing up the benefits and the harms?
I dunno, maybe gwern's article about nicotine is in fact terrible. I've only looked at it very briefly, and superficially it looks reasonable to me.
"But it turns out that actually nicotine[1] is addictive and bad for you -- Alex's post had a link supporting that." Eh. Alex's post had a link to something that ... actually could be fairly summarized as "I haven't found nicotine[1] addictive and it seems to be good for me overall". What Alex presumably has in mind is the three tweets at the end of the article, under the heading "PS: Be careful". One claims, not giving any evidence, that a bunch of people read gwern's article and ended up addicted to tobacco. One claims, not giving any details, that gwern's article "almost ruined my life". One sketches a way someone could end up in trouble after reading the article, though it isn't clear to me whether its author is saying "this is what happened to me" or "I can imagine this happening" and it looks much more like the latter.
[1] Throughout this paragraph "nicotine" means "nicotine not taken by smoking or vaping"; it isn't surprising that there might be a difference and gwern's article very strongly advises not doing those things.
If you weren't predisposed to think ill of gwern and his writing, would you actually be impressed by this? On the one hand we have what looks like a careful weighing of harms and benefits, with references to the literature; on the other hand we have at most three anecdotes with no details at all. It could still be that they're right and gwern's wrong, of course, but "look at this loser, he posted all those words and here are three tweets that point the other way" doesn't seem like much of an argument to me.
Some of Gwerns's articles are evergreens and I really like them.
This one in particular looks like a lot of handwaving and justification for self medication.
People aren't perfect. Gwern has a good reputation but he's still human and most likely has flaws, this one article in particular looks pretty flawed to me.
The simplest truths are the hardest to prove/explain.
god, i thought i was the problem
adderall
Rationality is mostly absence of bs, so when you sit down to write about it, you are most likely already a person who produces too much words on any subject.
It’s called a gish gallop. Rationalists are masters at bullshitting, and the best way to do that is to say so many things that people can’t really devote the time to proving you wrong. If they do try, they counter with even more words until you give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.
This is a funny juxtaposition; I grew up creationist, and 'gish gallop' of course originated as something the rationalists [0] used to describe the creationists! 'rationalist' may have shifted slightly as a descriptor, but honestly perhaps the shoe has always fit pretty well.
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
There's a lot of parallels between rationalist belief in AI and religious belief in God. Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager. The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture. There's similar group dynamics with high priests (tech CEOs), theologians (Yud, SA), sacred texts (various substacks, lesswrong), heresies (logical fallacies)...
I'm not the only one who's noticed it:
"Why do tech CEOs sound like doomsday cult leaders?"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/social-trends/article-w...
I see this said all the time and I think it's almost entirely wrong.
(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)
"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.
"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)
"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.
(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)
"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)
"sacred texts": see above.
"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that. If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
You might be able to make an argument that Roko's basilisk is an example of a heresy within rationalism? But I don't think the existence of inside-baseball debates where some positions are officially deprecated is terribly specifically religious. The idea that goto statements are a great way of structuring a piece of computer software would be a heresy, for instance. Belief in "cold fusion" would be another. But computing and physics aren't religion-like in any useful sense on that account.
I should maybe clarify that when I say "I see this said all the time" I don't mean specifically the version targeted at internet-rationalists. There's the version aimed at singularitarians (not all internet-rationalists are singularitarians nor vice versa) and a slightly different version claiming that atheism is just another religion, and so forth. The general template is: Thing X is just another religion / just warmed-over Christianity, because here are half a dozen things about it that have some loose resemblance to some religious thing. I find such things uniformly unconvincing; it seems to me that one can draw loose parallels between almost anything and almost anything else.
And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.
I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".
I'm not going to get drawn into a thousands paragraph debate about rationalists belief, so this will be my only reply and I'll welcome your rebottle.
Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.
And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:
"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."
Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.
> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!
I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.
> every field will have its "theologians"
They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.
> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise, and why it was so easy to be fooled by people like Musk who used good arguments but lacked actual expertise.
I'll attempt to be brief.
If you think it's likely that there will be a singularity and it will be bad, then you'll regard someone working toward it as bad. That doesn't mean that there's any good-versus-evil-ness about the singularity itself. Whereas Armageddon is specifically a battle of good against evil, the Last Judgement is specifically a separation of people into (something like) good versus evil, etc.
The "betrayal" line is saying that OpenAI was founded as, supposedly, an ethical company trying to make sure that AI worked out for the good of humanity, and Altman is failing to live up to that. It doesn't have anything to do with any high view of Altman personally.
I agree that that line is more positive about both Musk and Zuckerberg than either deserves. But the claim wasn't "some rationalists think too highly of tech CEOs", it was "rationalists think about tech CEOs like religious people think about their high priests", and the point is that nothing I've found suggests that that's so. Sometimes people say nice things about (say) Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes not so nice (there was one comment where someone suggested that a different approach to AI safety might have resulted in "Mark Zuckerberg stamping on a face for ever") but no more of it than in the world at large is looking reverently to them as authorities.
If you're happy also saying that computer science and academia in general are religions, then fair enough, but at this point I think saying "X is a religion" is no longer really saying anything.
I don't know whether you're right or wrong in saying that rationalists are too unwilling to accept arguments that are logically invalid but persuasive in other ways, but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
> but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
Logical fallacies do nothing to show an argument is wrong.
All they do is demonstrate that a chain of reasoning cannot be a logical proof that the conclusion must be true, given its premises.
Dismissing arguments because "they're fallacious" is actually not so far removed from dismissing ideas because they're heretical.
In each case, what matters is whether the ideas are true, not whether your interlocutor proved rigorously it is true.
It's like those HN commenters who just spew links to cherry picked sources at you when you call them out for misleading people. It's an only slightly obfuscated attempt to move the goalposts from "hey idiot take a step back and look at the big picture, your core point is garbage and you're a bad person for even making it" type argument to one of implicitly accepting their premise and then bickering over sources (in the case of the filthy linkposters) or the exact nature of the minutia and excruciating detail they have produced in droves (in the case of the rationalists).
That said I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.
When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere.
What, exactly, is the point of this post, and especially the point of it on HN? It appears to be a rant directed at 2 people on the internet that has nothing to do with tech.
This website absolutely hates scott alexander, I am not sure why.
If i had to guess its because he argues for slowing down AI development and everyone here is a massive AI booster.
"Brevity is the soul of wit."
Gish gallop. Harder to argue with.
I might want to think of myself as a rationalist but I don't want to be ideated that way.
I'm more than happy to be badged a secular humanist and I am led to beleive they overlap but I see differences.
What really shits me is how many rationalists are basically mansplaining tiresome pedants. And, hyper argumentative.
This post is too long to read. Tldr?
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> nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
Indeed, it seems to me that nicotine may indeed have beneficial effects in some contexts.
It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.
The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.
The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)
Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.
but idk, just sayin lol
Why do you trust your imagination on this? That how folks thought before the French Revolution, invention of the scientific method, etc.
Actual evidence in the real world points to pesticides causing the rise in Parkinson’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/opinion/parkinsons-pestic...
Oh, I assure you that I don't trust my imagination on this!
Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.
So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)
And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.
It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.
It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...
And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...
Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol
Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."
And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"
At that point I was like whoa.
Here's a bunch of research stuff on ambroxol and Parkinson's:
Ambroxol-induced rescue of defective glucocerebrosidase is associated with increased LIMP-2 and saposin C levels in GBA1 mutant Parkinson's disease cells – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26094596/
Ambroxol as a Treatment for Parkinson Disease Dementia – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
Protocol of ASPro-PD: a phase 3 trial of ambroxol to slow progression in genetically stratified Parkinson’s disease – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-026-13683-7
Ambroxol as a disease-modifying treatment to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in GBA-associated Parkinson’s disease: a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase II trial. The AMBITIOUS study protocol – https://neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000535
Ambroxol for the Treatment of Patients With Parkinson Disease With and Without Glucocerebrosidase Gene Mutations – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
It's wildly interesting. I'm super curious.
So a thing with these studies is that it's looks like ambroxol doses for Parkinson's need to be substantially higher than the cough-syrup/OTC-mucolytic doses. Seemingly to get enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. So this doesn't pin down any pulmonary foundation for Parkinson's.
But it is very, very interesting that... practically all of the stuff that impacts Parkinson's for better or worse always has a pulmonary element. All of it, as far as I can tell. But I don't know! I'm just seeing a structure of evidence as leaning a certain way. Could just be my imagination. And I don't trust it. But I'ma keep reading for sure.
hahhaha I forgot what thread we were on
it's very funny to have written SO MUCH WORDS under the link "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?", aaahahah
I suspect we'll find that some smokers (in addition to being addicted) were self-medicating.
Not sure about earlier, but during WWI cigarettes were smoked at incredible scale, to help deal with the stresses and horrors of war. Ensuring an ample supply to front-line troops was major gov't priority.
And I certainly have known cigarette smokers who explained "yes, I know they cause cancer and other bad stuff - but they also help with other serious (physical and mental) problems that I have, and I'm choosing quality of life over quantity".
Funnily enough, the main body of the post the author links to is about the exact opposite
It is? Am I getting a different link to you, or is my reading comprehension just terrible at 9.30pm or something.
https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
It says the exact opposite to me?
This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
And “bad for you” is left completely unexamined. It feels very dishonest to me, and it’s a shame because I was hoping to learn something new.
What? Why jump to that conclusion, without any evidence?
Especially in a context where most scientists blame pesticides?
Personally, I often write long responses when making a contrarian point. The reason is because people have been heavily conditioned to believe certain things and making a contrarian point requires you to provide an alternative interpretation for all of their many beliefs around the subject.
Every contrarian idea has to dismantle layer upon layer of existing beliefs to even be considered plausible. Many people will discard it outright because of how much it goes against their worldview.
The worst part is that people have also been conditioned to believe that long, detailed explanations are the result of delusions built up in social media 'echo chambers' or 'conspiracy theories' based upon fake news. LLMs will typically act as though they are concerned for your mental health if you provide a valid rebuttal to all of their points in such a discussion; they will say "Note what you did, you've made your argument unfalsifiable..." And I have to point out that its own mainstream version is also merely a narrative and also unfalsifiable and backed by even less evidence. The discussion has to be evaluated from first principles, taking into account empirical evidence, trends and incentives.
Incentives are much more important than simplicity of arguments to estimate accuracy. People will go to great lengths to obtain rewards and avoid punishment. Often, reality is complicated, not simple. Occam's razor generally isn't correct these days. Perhaps it was at one point in the past; those were simpler times.
From my own life experience and behavior, there are no simple explanations for anything I did or what happened to me; so I don't see why simple explanations are valid for anyone else. Occam's razor is essentially part of Hollywood's conditioning; conditioning people to people map their lived experiences into simple movie-like narratives.
It's because you read too slowly.
Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him.
If the ideas are not complex enough to warrant a long explanation, it is a failure of the writer to be unable to produce the same information more succinctly.
Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.
Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.
I'm a really slow reader. Had some hilarious conversations with fast readers. They really enjoy fluffy low density content. I ask what is on the page they just read and their first reaction is to look at it again. I describe barely related thoughts I had reading the page, the character of the author from their choice of words, they look at me as if I've done just the thing you aren't suppose to.
It takes a few words to communicate an idea; it takes a lot more to defend it. Which one is the blog post in question trying to do?
But "a lot more" is not a bounded heuristic. A good communicator would use more words to defend and idea than to present it, but way less than a bad communicator.
Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.
Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.
The complaint is about the lack of writing skill:
Honestly, Gwern and Scott are both pretty good writers. Dunno about Yud though.
It’s hard to write a rigorous analysis of something without length. The challenge is keeping it interesting.
My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill. The dilemma of the rationalist writer is about whether be skipped by wizards or be understandable by maglesses.
You can take the truthest truth ever like "god does not exist". This statement is rationalist and true and short so the author is supposed to cry with a tears of happiness. But making a wisard to behave like this requires something more thorough to be sent. Maybe the author's post also has a chance to become a rationalist if it would be a little bit... longer?
I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.
Nothing requires you to abandon skimming. But imagine some Christian person which is going to become an atheist. If the rationalist resource requires the reader to have in his mind all the atheist memes, he will never switch and probably report some errors. If you are a bald reader then have a bit of respect who might read these things his first time. Rationalist articles should be made for stupids, like a "technology connections" yt channel. If you are not stupid, you might not need to read a rationalist's stuff any more to save your time for more advanced topics.
I don’t think brief writing has to be niche/rely on pre-existing context in its audience. Good writing is accessible because it is brief.
The assumption that “stupids” are going to be more receptive to long-form/from-first-principles arguments is wrong, I think. So is the assumption that that’s why rationalists write that way (it’s more likely because of bubble culture and/or because people like hearing themselves talk).
What's a magless? Is that some weird variation on muggle? If so, oh my god, get a life.
I tried to search about it, and Google AI overview gave an answer based on your comment. I didn't find anything about magless in rationalism page on Wikipedia or LessWrong, so the answer was based only on this thread. I'm surprised about how easy is to mess with AI overview answers like that. State actors must have been doing this by the clock
> My controversial thesis was about author's poor reading skill.
What makes you think the author has poor reading skill?
Projection by the look of it.
If he would follow his own advice he just put the Pascal's quote, maybe in slightly different words. What is this article if not a rationalist blog post way too long for the scope of thoughts has been put within?
Do you not think their belief to some extent involves believing formalizing things [even to a reductively useless point] makes them more adept at understanding the world?
I'll cite an example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-.... I can make the case that one might feel smarter simply having read through the grating writing.
Like a certain Terry Pratchett character you think you are a wizard but also spelled wizard wrong...
Do not tell anyone I still have not achieved C1. And sorry for not using a spellchecker, the war condition and scattered blackouts is why I am busy with trolling on the only resource on the Internets which provides a decent experience via edge (2.5G).
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain
Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.
I am a fan of falsely attributed quotes...
>> “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain
> Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.
Not false: Balzac published first, Pascal second:
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
I was so confused about how this could be chronologically possible, until I learned there is another famous Balzac besides Honoré.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Guez_de_Balzac
After a quick Google you seem to be right that it is falsely attributed. Blaise Pascal does seem to be the most accepted originator however.
The author didn't say that they wanted a short video. You're constructing a strawman to gleefully knock down. How very "rational".
Rationalism is for people who enjoy jerking off to their supposed superior intellect while reading bad Harry Potter fan fictions.
The post's clearest claim is that rationalists "lack wisdom" and makes a circular argument - posts are too long because they lack the wisdom to make shorter posts, and the evidence for the lack of wisdom is the length of the posts. It says nothing useful or with predictive power. Another claim is that they didn't read an article by Scott Alexander, they didn't have much to say about it, and somehow conclude that makes them wiser, or a better writer, or superior in some vague way.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
> "Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.
Take this HN thread, here are some comments that could all be replaced with "because <someone else> is dumber than me" and convey the same meaning:
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
- "When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere."
- "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
I cannot speak on behalf of Hacker News commenters that are not myself, I can only defend my words, which were far milder than that.
You aren't being asked to speak on behalf of Hacker New commenters, I'm asking you things like:
- why are you surprised that anyone doesn't like being sneered at?
- do you think those 'sneering' comments I quoted are good and interesting, would you like it if there were more of them?
- why were your words ""Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something" when sneering and not engaging are different things?
- why are you surprised that a group which is trying to avoid the normal vibes, personal attacks, gut feelings, and instead focus on evidence, logic and reasoning, is particularly against the things they are trying to avoid?
In your original comment, you quoted my text. In the follow-up, you changed the subject, talking about a bunch of other comments (most of which are heavily downvoted). My reply was a commentary on my text, not what anyone else said. My point was that you took one mildly acerbic offhand comment and made it out to be something that it was not (i.e. unfairly cruel and hostile). This is because you interpreted offhand dismissal as "sneering." Frankly, your reply was far ruder and more sarcastic than anything I said.
> None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering).
This one is thoughtful correcr observation: "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
It is not snearing, it is factual description.