One of my least popular comments on Less Wrong was that nobody was a “decent rationalist.” Perhaps now is the time to explain what I meant by that.
Rationality is an ideal. Whether or not it’s a particularly good ideal, it’s definitely not a good description of any actually existing people, which proposition is approximately what this entire site is about. To me, being a “decent rationalist” would entail being decently rational: not perfectly rational, but at least mostly rational. It’s clear that nobody approaches that state.
When people describe themselves as “rationalists”, perhaps some of them mean that they aspire to the ideal of rationality. But it sounds like they believe that they actually practice rationality. At best, this would be dishonest boasting; at worst it would be self-delusion.
So perhaps that’s why people react negatively to the label: they hear it as a claim of an implausible achievement, not a belief system or social group.
(It gets worse when you use the term to identify the social club rather than a rather broad set of beliefs, because then you end up saying that someone is not a “rationalist” or an “objectivist” or a “libertarian”. It’s sort of like how certain academics now use the term “philosopher” to mean “person teaching philosophy at a university” or “person submitting papers to philosophy journals”, by which standard Socrates wasn’t a philosopher.)
In the years that I’ve been watching this social group, I’ve struggled with the question of what to call it when talking about it to other people. “Eliezer’s cult” seems unnecessarily derogatory, as does the tongue-in-cheek “Bayesian Conspiracy”. “Yudkowskians” is accurate and not derogatory but perhaps unnecessarily limiting, and surely oversimplified. “Less Wrong” is the best label I have, which would make individuals “Lesswrongers”.
There’s another possible reason people might react negatively: in the 20th century, any number of atrocities were justified on the basis of being “scientific”, “modern”, or “rational”: dialectical materialism, Levittown, indiscriminate use of pesticides, Mutually Assured Destruction, Schelling’s losing strategy in the Vietnam war, low-cost housing developments, childbirth under anesthesia, radium water treatments, lobotomies, electroshock, The Projects, razing neighborhoods to run interstate highways through downtown, IMF neoliberal economic policies, eugenics, and so on.
It turns out that conflating your position with knowledge and rationality, and your opponent’s position with ignorance and insanity, is such an effective rhetorical strategy that you can use it to ram through all sorts of terrible ideas. Perhaps because of this, a lot of people have developed a sort of memetic allergic reaction to explicit claims of rationality.
One of my least popular comments on Less Wrong was that nobody was a “decent rationalist.” Perhaps now is the time to explain what I meant by that.
Rationality is an ideal. Whether or not it’s a particularly good ideal, it’s definitely not a good description of any actually existing people, which proposition is approximately what this entire site is about. To me, being a “decent rationalist” would entail being decently rational: not perfectly rational, but at least mostly rational. It’s clear that nobody approaches that state.
When people describe themselves as “rationalists”, perhaps some of them mean that they aspire to the ideal of rationality. But it sounds like they believe that they actually practice rationality. At best, this would be dishonest boasting; at worst it would be self-delusion.
So perhaps that’s why people react negatively to the label: they hear it as a claim of an implausible achievement, not a belief system or social group.
(It gets worse when you use the term to identify the social club rather than a rather broad set of beliefs, because then you end up saying that someone is not a “rationalist” or an “objectivist” or a “libertarian”. It’s sort of like how certain academics now use the term “philosopher” to mean “person teaching philosophy at a university” or “person submitting papers to philosophy journals”, by which standard Socrates wasn’t a philosopher.)
In the years that I’ve been watching this social group, I’ve struggled with the question of what to call it when talking about it to other people. “Eliezer’s cult” seems unnecessarily derogatory, as does the tongue-in-cheek “Bayesian Conspiracy”. “Yudkowskians” is accurate and not derogatory but perhaps unnecessarily limiting, and surely oversimplified. “Less Wrong” is the best label I have, which would make individuals “Lesswrongers”.
There’s another possible reason people might react negatively: in the 20th century, any number of atrocities were justified on the basis of being “scientific”, “modern”, or “rational”: dialectical materialism, Levittown, indiscriminate use of pesticides, Mutually Assured Destruction, Schelling’s losing strategy in the Vietnam war, low-cost housing developments, childbirth under anesthesia, radium water treatments, lobotomies, electroshock, The Projects, razing neighborhoods to run interstate highways through downtown, IMF neoliberal economic policies, eugenics, and so on.
It turns out that conflating your position with knowledge and rationality, and your opponent’s position with ignorance and insanity, is such an effective rhetorical strategy that you can use it to ram through all sorts of terrible ideas. Perhaps because of this, a lot of people have developed a sort of memetic allergic reaction to explicit claims of rationality.