The first post is Basketballism. That post is awesome. Loved it.
The second post is the rest of the post. That post tries to answer the question in the title, but doesn’t feel like it makes much progress to me. There’s some good discussion that goes back and forth, but mostly everyone agrees on what should be clear to all: No, rationalism doesn’t let you work miracles at will, and we’re not obviously transforming the world or getting key questions reliably right. Yes, it seems to be helpful, and generally the people who do it are winning in the senses that locally count, and that likely compound, but the opportunity costs make it unclear how big a win we’re getting, etc etc.
Whereas the argument in the first section was, to me, much more compelling. I think my ideal outcome would be that the collection includes “Basketballism” but not the second part.
Consider this as two posts.
The first post is Basketballism. That post is awesome. Loved it.
The second post is the rest of the post. That post tries to answer the question in the title, but doesn’t feel like it makes much progress to me. There’s some good discussion that goes back and forth, but mostly everyone agrees on what should be clear to all: No, rationalism doesn’t let you work miracles at will, and we’re not obviously transforming the world or getting key questions reliably right. Yes, it seems to be helpful, and generally the people who do it are winning in the senses that locally count, and that likely compound, but the opportunity costs make it unclear how big a win we’re getting, etc etc.
Whereas the argument in the first section was, to me, much more compelling. I think my ideal outcome would be that the collection includes “Basketballism” but not the second part.