I think of “the rationalist project” as “having succeeded” in a very limited and relative sense that is still quite valuable.
For example, back when the US and Chinese governments managed to accidentally make a half-cocked bioweapon and let it escape from a lab and then not do any adequate public health at all, or hold the people who caused the megadeath event even slightly accountable, and all of the institutions of basically every civilization on Earth failed to do their fucking jobs, the “rationalists” (ie the people on LW and so on) were neck and neck with anonymous anime catgirls on twitter (who overlap a lot with rationalists in practice) in terms of being actually sane and reasonable voices in the chaos… and it turns out that having some sane and reasonable voices is useful!
Eliezer says “Rationalists should win” but Yvain said “its really not that great” and Yvain got more upvotes (90 vs 247 currently) so Yvain is prolly right, right? But either way it means rationality is probably at least a little bit great <3
I think of “the rationalist project” as “having succeeded” in a very limited and relative sense that is still quite valuable.
For example, back when the US and Chinese governments managed to accidentally make a half-cocked bioweapon and let it escape from a lab and then not do any adequate public health at all, or hold the people who caused the megadeath event even slightly accountable, and all of the institutions of basically every civilization on Earth failed to do their fucking jobs, the “rationalists” (ie the people on LW and so on) were neck and neck with anonymous anime catgirls on twitter (who overlap a lot with rationalists in practice) in terms of being actually sane and reasonable voices in the chaos… and it turns out that having some sane and reasonable voices is useful!
Eliezer says “Rationalists should win” but Yvain said “its really not that great” and Yvain got more upvotes (90 vs 247 currently) so Yvain is prolly right, right? But either way it means rationality is probably at least a little bit great <3