He is a rationalist who is deeply against living by social norms and just sees them as defaults, and is “non-default” about pretty much everything including work path, values etc., as well as lifestyle including cooking (lives off takeaway so as not to spend time grocery shopping and cooking), cleaning (does not have much of a regular cleaning habit – I broke glass in his kitchen a month ago and he said I shouldn’t have to clean it up and it’s still there), sleeping (he has no regular sleep schedule and sleeps when he wants to. The kind of work that he does is largely from home with long deadlines. He ships a prescription anti-narcolepsy from overseas which allows him to stay awake for long stretches on little sleep – although he plans on giving this up soon). He also takes party drugs and for a while, was taking quite high amounts of MDMA on a weekly basis, which pretty much wiped him out the day or two after. I have always been uncomfortable around drugs, although he did not really know the extent of my discomfort, and I can’t take them myself due to mental health. He dropped back to once a month after I expressed concerns about escalation and he acknowledges that he has some susceptibility to addiction, although he is not currently dependent.“
One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested. I was furious at his intellectual arrogance and the danger he had put us both in. I lost a week of unpaid time off work and my mum had to nurse me through my allergic reaction to the treatment. I told him I wanted to break up, but we ended up supporting each other through the treatment and ultimately decided to get back together and work things out.
That he fails at basic instrumental rationality. I would be very interested in seeing a valid cost-benefit analysis which can justify leaving dangerous broken glass around, eating only take-out, and ignoring the risk of STI...
What I make of it is that “rationalist” is getting to sound cool enough that there are going to be people who claim to be rationalists even though they aren’t notably rational.
Lists of “how to identify a real rationalist” will presumably run up against Goodhart’s Law, but it still might make sense to start working on them.
Just because a manipulative narcissistic asshole calls himself a rationalist, it doesn’t make him rational in the meaning of the word coined by Eliezer and generally shared here.
He is a rationalist who is deeply against living by social norms and just sees them as defaults, and is “non-default” about pretty much everything
As soon as I read that, I thought “uh oh, this is bad...”, long before getting to the part about the STI. And unfortunately, this first sentence describes too many people in the LessWrong community, even ones who are more careful about STIs. Maybe this will be a wakeup call to people to stop equating “rationalist” with “rejecting social norms.”
I think this one by Yvain works as a plausible explanation for why this is unlikely to change.
Do you deliberately pick topics that cause controversy here, or is your model of this community flawed? Either way I find people’s reactions to your posts amusing.
I think this one by Yvain works as a plausible explanation for why this is unlikely to change.
I love Yvain’s post on meta-contrarianism, and yeah, it pinpoints a major source of the problem. I guess I tend to be slightly more optimistic about the possibility of LessWrong changing in this regard, but maybe you’re right.
Do you deliberately pick topics that cause controversy here, or is your model of this community flawed? Either way I find people’s reactions to your posts amusing.
When I write my more controversial posts, I do so knowing I’m going against views that are widely-held in the community, though I often had difficulty predicting what the exact reaction will be.
If you’re going to argue using appeals to tradition, it helps to know something about the history of the tradition you’re appealing to. In particular whether it has centuries of experience behind it or is merely something some meta-contrarians from the previous generation thought was a good idea.
One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested.
If only there was a simple magic word that transferred control of one’s own sexual health into one’s own hands. Like “No”, for instance. For creative emphasis or in response to repeated attempts to initiate sex despite refusal to honour basic safety requests there are alternative expressions of refusal such as “You want to put that filthy, infested thing inside me? Eww, gross!”
The letter writer mentions her (ex-)boyfriend’s OK Cupid account screenname in the comments. I looked at it and didn’t recognize him. I checked the same screenname on Reddit, which she said he also used (no account under that name) and here (an account exists by that name, but I don’t think it’s the same person—in particular the OKC account has a characteristic punctuation error that the local account doesn’t make). If anyone from Missouri wants to see if he looks familiar there are breadcrumbs to follow.
It’s possible that the choice of the word “rationalist” was a coincidence and this is not a peripheral community member mistreating his Muggle girlfriend, but just some random guy. I think it is worth finding out if we can.
There is often mentioned “LW” in the comments, but it seems to be an abbreviation for Letter Writer (the person who wrote the letter about the “rationalist”), not LessWrong. It took me some time to realize this.
Well, I expected that making “rationality” popular would bring some problems. If we succeed to make the word “rationality” high-status, suddenly all kinds of people will start to self-identify as “rationalists”, without complying with our definition. (And the next step will be them trying to prove they are the real “rationalists”, and all the others are fakes.) But I didn’t expect this kind of thing, and this soon.
On the other hand, there doesn’t have to be any connection with us. (EDIT: I was wrong here.) I mean… LessWrong does not have a copyright on “rationality”.
Thanks for pointing this out; I didn’t read all the comments previously (only the first third, or so) because there is so many of them. (Here is a link to the HPMoR comment, for other curious people.) I’ve read the remaining ones now.
By the way, the comments are closed today. (They were still open yesterday.) I am happy someone was fast enough to post there this:
tl;dr: LW, this dude is calling himself “rational” but is not rational.
Reading the comments, I am impressed by their high quality. I actually feared something like using “rationality” as a boo light, but there is only an occassional fallacy of gray (everyone is equally irrational), and only a very few commenters try to generalize the behavior to men in general. Based on my experience from the rest of the internet, I expected much more of that. Actually, there are also some very smart comments, like:
it is rational and logical to take emotions into account. Emotions are real things that human beings have – we have them often for good reasons, and we’re not Vulcans (besides, I’m betting both Spock and Tuvok have really neat clean quarters and would never leave broken glass lying around to defy the man, because it would not be logical). Anyway. Emotions are valid. Caring for the emotional well being of your loved ones is important and also a rational choice. People have different preferences for things, and feel differently about things, and negotiating those differences is a huge part of a good relationship.
If by chance the person who wrote the letter comes here, I strongly recommend reading “The Mask of Sanity” for a descriptions of how psychopaths work. I believe some of the examples would pattern-match very strongly.
And the lesson for the LessWrong community is probably this: Some psychopaths will find LW and HPMoR, and will use “rationality” as their excuse. We should probably have some visible FAQ that contradicts them. (On a second thought: Having the FAQ on LessWrong would not have helped in this specific case, because the abusive boyfriend only showed her HPMoR. And having this kind of disclaimer on HPMoR would probably feel weird. Maybe the best solution would be to have a link to the LessWrong FAQ on the HPMoR web page; something like: “This fan fiction is about rationality. Read here more about what is—and what isn’t—considered rational by its author.)
One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested.
I thought accepted theory was that rationalists, are less credulous but better at taking ideas seriously, but what do I know, really? Maybe he needs to read more random blog posts about quantum physics and AI to aspire for LW level of rationality.
(...) despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected (...)
So uh, let’s run down the checklist...
[ X ] Proclaims rationality and keeps it as part of their identity. [ X ] Underdog / against-society / revolution mentality. [ X ] Fails to credit or fairly evaluate accepted wisdom. [ ] Fails to produce results and is not “successful” in practice. [ X ] Argues for bottom-lines. [ X ] Rationalizes past beliefs. [ X ] Fails to update when run over by a train of overwhelming critical evidence.
Well, at least, there’s that, huh? From all evidence, they do seem to at least succeed in making money and stuff. And hold together a relationship somehow. Oh wait, after reading original link, looks like even that might not actually be working!
So… What do we make of this?
Excerpt:
That he fails at basic instrumental rationality. I would be very interested in seeing a valid cost-benefit analysis which can justify leaving dangerous broken glass around, eating only take-out, and ignoring the risk of STI...
What I make of it is that “rationalist” is getting to sound cool enough that there are going to be people who claim to be rationalists even though they aren’t notably rational.
Lists of “how to identify a real rationalist” will presumably run up against Goodhart’s Law, but it still might make sense to start working on them.
Just because a manipulative narcissistic asshole calls himself a rationalist, it doesn’t make him rational in the meaning of the word coined by Eliezer and generally shared here.
also remember: what’s rational to do if you’re a narcissistic asshole is different than what’s rational for a nicer person
As soon as I read that, I thought “uh oh, this is bad...”, long before getting to the part about the STI. And unfortunately, this first sentence describes too many people in the LessWrong community, even ones who are more careful about STIs. Maybe this will be a wakeup call to people to stop equating “rationalist” with “rejecting social norms.”
I think this one by Yvain works as a plausible explanation for why this is unlikely to change.
Do you deliberately pick topics that cause controversy here, or is your model of this community flawed? Either way I find people’s reactions to your posts amusing.
I love Yvain’s post on meta-contrarianism, and yeah, it pinpoints a major source of the problem. I guess I tend to be slightly more optimistic about the possibility of LessWrong changing in this regard, but maybe you’re right.
When I write my more controversial posts, I do so knowing I’m going against views that are widely-held in the community, though I often had difficulty predicting what the exact reaction will be.
If you’re going to argue using appeals to tradition, it helps to know something about the history of the tradition you’re appealing to. In particular whether it has centuries of experience behind it or is merely something some meta-contrarians from the previous generation thought was a good idea.
The character described sounds dangerous to himself and others.
If only there was a simple magic word that transferred control of one’s own sexual health into one’s own hands. Like “No”, for instance. For creative emphasis or in response to repeated attempts to initiate sex despite refusal to honour basic safety requests there are alternative expressions of refusal such as “You want to put that filthy, infested thing inside me? Eww, gross!”
The letter writer mentions her (ex-)boyfriend’s OK Cupid account screenname in the comments. I looked at it and didn’t recognize him. I checked the same screenname on Reddit, which she said he also used (no account under that name) and here (an account exists by that name, but I don’t think it’s the same person—in particular the OKC account has a characteristic punctuation error that the local account doesn’t make). If anyone from Missouri wants to see if he looks familiar there are breadcrumbs to follow.
It’s possible that the choice of the word “rationalist” was a coincidence and this is not a peripheral community member mistreating his Muggle girlfriend, but just some random guy. I think it is worth finding out if we can.
It appears the letter writer is in or from Sydney, Australia. Does this ring a bell to any Sydney LWers?
There is often mentioned “LW” in the comments, but it seems to be an abbreviation for Letter Writer (the person who wrote the letter about the “rationalist”), not LessWrong. It took me some time to realize this.
Well, I expected that making “rationality” popular would bring some problems. If we succeed to make the word “rationality” high-status, suddenly all kinds of people will start to self-identify as “rationalists”, without complying with our definition. (And the next step will be them trying to prove they are the real “rationalists”, and all the others are fakes.) But I didn’t expect this kind of thing, and this soon.
On the other hand, there doesn’t have to be any connection with us. (EDIT: I was wrong here.) I mean… LessWrong does not have a copyright on “rationality”.
Comments mention HPMoR, and letter writer says he read it aloud to her. The Modafinil use is also circumstantial evidence.
Thanks for pointing this out; I didn’t read all the comments previously (only the first third, or so) because there is so many of them. (Here is a link to the HPMoR comment, for other curious people.) I’ve read the remaining ones now.
By the way, the comments are closed today. (They were still open yesterday.) I am happy someone was fast enough to post there this:
Reading the comments, I am impressed by their high quality. I actually feared something like using “rationality” as a boo light, but there is only an occassional fallacy of gray (everyone is equally irrational), and only a very few commenters try to generalize the behavior to men in general. Based on my experience from the rest of the internet, I expected much more of that. Actually, there are also some very smart comments, like:
If by chance the person who wrote the letter comes here, I strongly recommend reading “The Mask of Sanity” for a descriptions of how psychopaths work. I believe some of the examples would pattern-match very strongly.
And the lesson for the LessWrong community is probably this: Some psychopaths will find LW and HPMoR, and will use “rationality” as their excuse. We should probably have some visible FAQ that contradicts them. (On a second thought: Having the FAQ on LessWrong would not have helped in this specific case, because the abusive boyfriend only showed her HPMoR. And having this kind of disclaimer on HPMoR would probably feel weird. Maybe the best solution would be to have a link to the LessWrong FAQ on the HPMoR web page; something like: “This fan fiction is about rationality. Read here more about what is—and what isn’t—considered rational by its author.)
The only thing he is getting right. ;)
I thought accepted theory was that rationalists, are less credulous but better at taking ideas seriously, but what do I know, really? Maybe he needs to read more random blog posts about quantum physics and AI to aspire for LW level of rationality.
So uh, let’s run down the checklist...
[ X ] Proclaims rationality and keeps it as part of their identity.
[ X ] Underdog / against-society / revolution mentality.
[ X ] Fails to credit or fairly evaluate accepted wisdom.
[ ] Fails to produce results and is not “successful” in practice.
[ X ] Argues for bottom-lines.
[ X ] Rationalizes past beliefs.
[ X ] Fails to update when run over by a train of overwhelming critical evidence.
Well, at least, there’s that, huh? From all evidence, they do seem to at least succeed in making money and stuff. And hold together a relationship somehow. Oh wait, after reading original link, looks like even that might not actually be working!