There is also a French non-profit called the Rationalist Union, co-founded by Langevin (of the Langevin Equation and Twin Paradox). Apparently, Borel, Einstein, and Hadamard all had some honorary role in the past. Like the British Rationalist Association, it seems it was associated with socialism and communism during the mid-20th Century. The best source I could find is translated French Wikipedia.
Yeah. The communist associations of past iterations of “rationalist” schools or communities is one the biggest piles of skulls I know about and try to always keep in mind.
Shaw had met Stalin in the Kremlin on 29 July 1931, and the Soviet leader had facilitated his tour of Russia in which he was able to observe, at least to his own satisfaction, that the statements being circulated about the famine in the Ukraine were merely rumours. He had seen that the peasants had plenty of food. In fact the famine had notoriously been caused by Stalin in his desperation to achieve the goals of his five-year plan. An estimated ten million people, mostly Ukrainians, died of starvation.
As someone who flirts with identifying as part of some kind of “rationalist” community, I find the actions of Shaw to be complicatedly troubling, and to disrupt “easy clean identification”.
Either I feel I must disavow Shaw, people like Shaw, and their gross and terrible political errors that related to some of the biggest issues and tragedies of their era, or else I must say that Shaw is still a sort of somehow a tolerably acceptable human to imagine collaborating with in limited ways in spite of his manifest flaws.
Shaw’s kind of error also troubles me when I imagine that there might be some deep substructure to reasoning and philosophy such that he and I share a philosophy somehow, and he did that while having a philosophy like mine… then if “beliefs cause behavior” (rather than mostly just being confabulated rationalizations after behaviors have already occured) then I find myself somewhat worried about the foundations of my own philosophy, and what horrible things it might cause me to “accidentally” endorse or promote through my own actions.
Maybe there is some way to use Shaw’s failure as a test case, and somehow trace the causality of his thinking to his bad actions, and then find any analogous flaws in myself and perform cautious self modification until analogous flaws are unlikely to exist? But that seems like a BIG project. I’m not sure my life is long enough to learn all the necessary facts and reasoning carefully enough to carry a project like that to adequate completion.
Thus the practical upshot, for me, is to be open to “fearing to tread” even more than normal until or unless there are pretty subjectively clear reasons to advance.
Also, my acknowledged limitations lead me to feel a minor duty to sometimes point out obviously evil things that my mental stance can’t help but see as pretty darn evil? Not all of them. Just really really big and important and obvious ones.
Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe in saying “FDA delenda est” semi-regularly I’m making a “Shaw and the Holodomor level error” by doing the opposite of what is good?
It seems virtuous, then, to at least emit such an idea every so often, when I actually really can’t help but believe in and directly see a certain evil, and see if anyone can offer coherent disagreement or agreement and thereby either (1) help fix the world by reducing that particular evil or else (2) help me get a better calibrated moral compass. Either way it seems like it would be good?
Also, in general, I feel that it is a good practice to, minimally, acknowledge the skulls so that I know that “ideas and identities and tendencies similar to mine” might have, in the past, lead to bad places.
To hide or flinch from the fact that former-”people calling themselves rationalists” were sometimes pretty bad at the biggest questions of suffering and happiness, or good and evil, seems like… like… probably not what someone who was good at virtue epistemology would do? So, I probably shouldn’t flinch. Probably.
I’m interested to know how much the prominent figures in these past Rationalist groups cared about rationality itself rather than its bedfellows (science, atheism, socialism or communism etc.). A related question is whether these groups sometimes functioned as a fig leaf for a certain kind of political association (e.g. scientifically-minded socialists).
From reading the J. B. S. Haldane biography linked in the OP, I got the sense that Haldane cared most about science and the status of scientists in society. He seems to care less about rationality per se than science. He was a devoted communist for a period but this also stems (in part) from the value he places on science. (He had the view that communist countries gave more status to scientists and were run more scientifically.) So I doubt he was involved with the Rationalist Association because of the politics (though maybe if the politics were very conservative he would have left).
Your concern makes a lot of sense. From my perspective, the lesson is “wannabe rationalists easily get politically mindkilled”. Whether you are woke, or alt-right, or libertarian, political allegiance always pushes you towards denying some politically inconvenient parts of reality.
(Different parts of reality are inconvenient for different political tribes; so you can still ignore one part of reality and feel intellectually superior to those differently politically mindkilled people who ignore a different part of reality. I suppose this is how Shaw felt.)
Or more generally, contrarians are also gullible as fuck, only about different things than the majority.
For example, my sympathies are roughly on the libertarian side, but I obviously notice it is often libertarians talking nonsense on topics like global warming or covid. Because those are exactly the parts of reality that are inconvenient for libertarians: where an isolated individual effort achieves practically nothing, and a collective action is needed to solve the problem. How inconvenient!
(And similarly, it is inconvenient for a socialist when Soviet Union… or Venezuela turns out to be a disaster. Oh wait, this is not true socialism, because nothing ever is. Similarly, North Korea is inconvenient for a neoreactionary; but don’t worry, North Korea is not a true family-owned state, because nothing ever is. Heredity of traits is inconvenient for the woke. Evolution is inconvenient for the religious. Etc.)
Maybe in saying “FDA delenda est” semi-regularly I’m making a “Shaw and the Holodomor level error” by doing the opposite of what is good?
Yes, it is possible. But I believe there is a middle ground where FDA is not destroyed completely, only the rules are changed, so that something not being approved by FDA (yet) is not a complete obstacle, or perhaps there are different levels of “approval” and some of them are granted rather quickly.
But whatever you do (whether you call yourself a rationalist or not), you should keep looking at the reality, evaluating new data, and sometimes changing your opinion.
It might also have been the case that a tour of Russia organized by Stalin indeed showed Shaw a bunch of towns that got extra food delieveries right before Shaw entered the town. Shaw then neither spoke Ukranian nor Russian and was likely dependend on a Soviet translator to talk with the peasants.
His problem might have been that he believed the evidence that Stalin carefully selected for him to be representative of the situation.
The holodomor denialism seems very similar to lab leak denailism. Lab leak denailism is also about trusting in certain authorities because you agree with them in your philosophical worldview and then accepting their cherry-picked and manipulated evidence.
With Omicron potentially escaping from South African labs, the lab leak denailism might even be more deadly. Avoiding holodomor denialism in the West wouldn’t have prevented or ended it. On the the other hand getting rid of lab leak denialism would have increased biosafety protocols.
There is also a French non-profit called the Rationalist Union, co-founded by Langevin (of the Langevin Equation and Twin Paradox). Apparently, Borel, Einstein, and Hadamard all had some honorary role in the past. Like the British Rationalist Association, it seems it was associated with socialism and communism during the mid-20th Century. The best source I could find is translated French Wikipedia.
Yeah. The communist associations of past iterations of “rationalist” schools or communities is one the biggest piles of skulls I know about and try to always keep in mind.
Wikipedia uses this URL about Stalin, Wells, Shaw, and the holodomor as a citation to argue that, in fact, many of them were either duped fools or worse into denying the holodomor. Quoting from the source there:
As someone who flirts with identifying as part of some kind of “rationalist” community, I find the actions of Shaw to be complicatedly troubling, and to disrupt “easy clean identification”.
Either I feel I must disavow Shaw, people like Shaw, and their gross and terrible political errors that related to some of the biggest issues and tragedies of their era, or else I must say that Shaw is still a sort of somehow a tolerably acceptable human to imagine collaborating with in limited ways in spite of his manifest flaws.
(From within judeo-christian philosophic frames this doesn’t seem super hard. The story is simply that all humans are quite bad by default, and it is rare and lucky for us to rise above our normal brokenness, and so any big non-monstrous actions a human performs is nearly pure bonus, and worthy of at least some praise no matter what other bad things are co-occuring in the soul of any given person.)
Shaw’s kind of error also troubles me when I imagine that there might be some deep substructure to reasoning and philosophy such that he and I share a philosophy somehow, and he did that while having a philosophy like mine… then if “beliefs cause behavior” (rather than mostly just being confabulated rationalizations after behaviors have already occured) then I find myself somewhat worried about the foundations of my own philosophy, and what horrible things it might cause me to “accidentally” endorse or promote through my own actions.
Maybe there is some way to use Shaw’s failure as a test case, and somehow trace the causality of his thinking to his bad actions, and then find any analogous flaws in myself and perform cautious self modification until analogous flaws are unlikely to exist? But that seems like a BIG project. I’m not sure my life is long enough to learn all the necessary facts and reasoning carefully enough to carry a project like that to adequate completion.
Thus the practical upshot, for me, is to be open to “fearing to tread” even more than normal until or unless there are pretty subjectively clear reasons to advance.
Also, my acknowledged limitations lead me to feel a minor duty to sometimes point out obviously evil things that my mental stance can’t help but see as pretty darn evil? Not all of them. Just really really big and important and obvious ones.
My current working test case for this is the FDA, which I suspect should be legislatively gutted.
Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe in saying “FDA delenda est” semi-regularly I’m making a “Shaw and the Holodomor level error” by doing the opposite of what is good?
It seems virtuous, then, to at least emit such an idea every so often, when I actually really can’t help but believe in and directly see a certain evil, and see if anyone can offer coherent disagreement or agreement and thereby either (1) help fix the world by reducing that particular evil or else (2) help me get a better calibrated moral compass. Either way it seems like it would be good?
Also, in general, I feel that it is a good practice to, minimally, acknowledge the skulls so that I know that “ideas and identities and tendencies similar to mine” might have, in the past, lead to bad places.
To hide or flinch from the fact that former-”people calling themselves rationalists” were sometimes pretty bad at the biggest questions of suffering and happiness, or good and evil, seems like… like… probably not what someone who was good at virtue epistemology would do? So, I probably shouldn’t flinch. Probably.
I’m interested to know how much the prominent figures in these past Rationalist groups cared about rationality itself rather than its bedfellows (science, atheism, socialism or communism etc.). A related question is whether these groups sometimes functioned as a fig leaf for a certain kind of political association (e.g. scientifically-minded socialists).
From reading the J. B. S. Haldane biography linked in the OP, I got the sense that Haldane cared most about science and the status of scientists in society. He seems to care less about rationality per se than science. He was a devoted communist for a period but this also stems (in part) from the value he places on science. (He had the view that communist countries gave more status to scientists and were run more scientifically.) So I doubt he was involved with the Rationalist Association because of the politics (though maybe if the politics were very conservative he would have left).
Your concern makes a lot of sense. From my perspective, the lesson is “wannabe rationalists easily get politically mindkilled”. Whether you are woke, or alt-right, or libertarian, political allegiance always pushes you towards denying some politically inconvenient parts of reality.
(Different parts of reality are inconvenient for different political tribes; so you can still ignore one part of reality and feel intellectually superior to those differently politically mindkilled people who ignore a different part of reality. I suppose this is how Shaw felt.)
Or more generally, contrarians are also gullible as fuck, only about different things than the majority.
For example, my sympathies are roughly on the libertarian side, but I obviously notice it is often libertarians talking nonsense on topics like global warming or covid. Because those are exactly the parts of reality that are inconvenient for libertarians: where an isolated individual effort achieves practically nothing, and a collective action is needed to solve the problem. How inconvenient!
(And similarly, it is inconvenient for a socialist when Soviet Union… or Venezuela turns out to be a disaster. Oh wait, this is not true socialism, because nothing ever is. Similarly, North Korea is inconvenient for a neoreactionary; but don’t worry, North Korea is not a true family-owned state, because nothing ever is. Heredity of traits is inconvenient for the woke. Evolution is inconvenient for the religious. Etc.)
Yes, it is possible. But I believe there is a middle ground where FDA is not destroyed completely, only the rules are changed, so that something not being approved by FDA (yet) is not a complete obstacle, or perhaps there are different levels of “approval” and some of them are granted rather quickly.
But whatever you do (whether you call yourself a rationalist or not), you should keep looking at the reality, evaluating new data, and sometimes changing your opinion.
It might also have been the case that a tour of Russia organized by Stalin indeed showed Shaw a bunch of towns that got extra food delieveries right before Shaw entered the town. Shaw then neither spoke Ukranian nor Russian and was likely dependend on a Soviet translator to talk with the peasants.
His problem might have been that he believed the evidence that Stalin carefully selected for him to be representative of the situation.
The holodomor denialism seems very similar to lab leak denailism. Lab leak denailism is also about trusting in certain authorities because you agree with them in your philosophical worldview and then accepting their cherry-picked and manipulated evidence.
With Omicron potentially escaping from South African labs, the lab leak denailism might even be more deadly. Avoiding holodomor denialism in the West wouldn’t have prevented or ended it. On the the other hand getting rid of lab leak denialism would have increased biosafety protocols.