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.
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.