Why aren’t “rationalists” surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren’t they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most “rationalists” just seem like ordinary people, perhaps of moderately above-average intelligence, with one more hobbyhorse to ride?
Because they don’t win? Because they don’t reliably steer reality into narrow regions other people consider desirable?
I’ve met and worked with several irrationalists whose models of reality were, to put it mildly, not correlated to said reailty, with one explicit, outspoken anti-rationalist with a totally weird, alien epistemology among them. All these people had a couple of interesting things in common.
On one hand, they were often dismal at planning – they were unable to see obvious things, and they couldn’t be convinced otherwise by any arguments appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ (they universally hated these words).
On the other hand, they were surprisingly good at execution. All of them were very energetic people who didn’t fear any work or situation at all, and I almost never saw any of them procrastinating. Could this be because their minds, due to their poor predictive ability, were unable to see the real difficulty of their tasks and thus avoided auto-switching into procrastination mode?
(And a third observation – all these people excelled in political environments. They tended to interpret their surroundings primarily in terms of who is kin to whom, who is a friend of who, who is sexually attracted to whom, what others think of me, who is the most influential dude around here etc etc. What they lost due to their desynchronization with factual reality, they gained back thanks to their political aptness. Do rationalists excel in political environments?)
It seems you are being respectful of the anonymity of these people, and very well, that. But you pique my curiosity… who were these people? What kind of group was it, and what was their explicit irrationality all about?
I can think of a few groups that might fit this mold, but the peculiar way you describe them makes me think you have something very specific and odd in mind. Children of the Almighty Cthulu?
Number One is a Russian guy, now in his late 40s, with a spectacular youth. Among his trades were smuggling (during the Soviet era he smuggled brandy from Kazakhstan to Russia in the water system of a railway car), teaching in a ghetto college (where he inadvertently tamed a class of delinquents by hurling a wrench at their leader), leading a programming lab in an industrial institute, starting the first 3D visualization company in our city, reselling TV advertising time at a great margin (which he obtained by undercover deals involving key TV people and some outright gangsters), and saving the world by trying to find venture funding for a savant inventor who supposedly had a technology enabling geothermal energy extraction (I also worked together with them on this project). He was capable of totally crazy things, such as harpooning a wall portrait of a notorious Caucasus clanlord in a room full of his followers. He had lots of money during his successful periods, but was unable to convert this into a longer-term success.
Number Two is a deaf-mute woman, now in her 40s, who owns and runs a web development company. Her speech is distorted, she reads people by the lips, and I wouldn’t rate her particularly attractive – but despite all this she is able to consistently score excellent development / outsourcing contracts with top nationwide brands. Unfortunately, she often forces totally weird decisions upon the development team – and when they try to convince her that the decisions are rubbish by appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’, she takes it as a direct attack on her status. A real example – she once actually imposed an official ban on criticizing her company, decisions of her company, employees and management of her company, partners of her company, products of her company and everything else directly or indirectly related to her company in all communication channels (Skype, bug trackers, IMs, phone conversations, forums etc.)!
Number Three is the most spectacular one – a Russian guy of Jewish descent, around 30, an avid status seeker with an alpha-male attitude who owns and runs several web / game outsourcing companies, plus has a high-level, high-status management/consultancy job in a well-known nationwide online company. He is almost always able to somehow secure funding for his companies and projects, including those which I personally wouldn’t consider marketable. He lives in several cities at once, is excellent at remote leadership and hiring, and is quick to act – when he learns of a talented programming or art team he could potentially partner with, he gets on a plane just to meet them in person.
It was this guy who made me seriously wonder about how immensely weird people’s worldviews can be. This guy constructs his worldview by cherry-picking pieces that appeal to his sense of truth from Abrahamic religions (excluding Islam and the Old Testament), Eastern teachings and, if I remember correctly, even fiction. He hates concepts like ‘logic’, ‘science’, ‘fact’ and ‘reality’ with a passion, and believes that they are evil concepts designed by Anglo-Saxons to corrode ‘good’ worldviews (such as the New-Testament Christian one), and he is actively protecting his worldview from being corroded by evil ideas. Here’s an actual example of his reasoning: “Dawkins is an Anglo-Saxon, and all Anglo-Saxons are evil liars, therefore all ideas Dawkins advocates are evil lies, therefore evolution is a lie and is evil.” He believes that The Enemy himself is sponsoring the evolutionary science by actually providing money, fame and other goods to its proponents. He is sincerely unable to understand how people can be genuinely altruistic without a religious upbringing (and of course, he doesn’t want to consider things like mirror neurons).
So, it was this guy who made me ask myself questions like ‘What is my definition of truth?’
How do you translate that into a question of definition of truth? The third guy is sufficiently rational to be successful, I guess he’s got excellent native intelligence allowing him to correctly judge people or influence their decisions, and that his verbal descriptions of his beliefs are mostly rationalization, not hurting his performance too much. If he was a rationalist, he’d probably be even more successful (or he’d find a different occupation).
Yes, the guy is smart, swift-thinking and quick to act when it comes to getting projects up from the ground, connecting the right people and getting funding from nowhere (much less so when it comes to technical details and fine-grained planning). His actual decisions are effective, regardless of the stuff he has in the conscious part of his head.
(Actually quite a lot of people whose ‘spoken’ belief systems are suboptimal or plain weird are perfectly able to drive cars, run companies, avoid tigers and otherwise deal with the reality effectively.)
But can we call such ‘hardware-accelerated’ decisions rational? I don’t know.
Regarding your question. We had obvious disagreements with this guy, and I spent some time thinking about how can we resolve them. As a result, I decided that trying to resolve them (on a conscious level of course) is futile unless we have an agreement about fundamental things—what we define as truth, and which methods can we use to derive truths from other truths.
I didn’t think much about this issue before I met him (a scientific, or more specifically, Popperian worldview was enough for me), and this was the first time I had to consciously think about the issue. I even doubt I knew the meaning of the term ‘epistemology’ back then :)
I have also noticed that people who good at manipulating and interacting with people are bad at manipulating and interacting with objective reality, and vice versa.
The key difference is that the politicals are ultimately dependent on the realists, but not vice versa.
Because they don’t win? Because they don’t reliably steer reality into narrow regions other people consider desirable?
I’ve met and worked with several irrationalists whose models of reality were, to put it mildly, not correlated to said reailty, with one explicit, outspoken anti-rationalist with a totally weird, alien epistemology among them. All these people had a couple of interesting things in common.
On one hand, they were often dismal at planning – they were unable to see obvious things, and they couldn’t be convinced otherwise by any arguments appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ (they universally hated these words).
On the other hand, they were surprisingly good at execution. All of them were very energetic people who didn’t fear any work or situation at all, and I almost never saw any of them procrastinating. Could this be because their minds, due to their poor predictive ability, were unable to see the real difficulty of their tasks and thus avoided auto-switching into procrastination mode?
(And a third observation – all these people excelled in political environments. They tended to interpret their surroundings primarily in terms of who is kin to whom, who is a friend of who, who is sexually attracted to whom, what others think of me, who is the most influential dude around here etc etc. What they lost due to their desynchronization with factual reality, they gained back thanks to their political aptness. Do rationalists excel in political environments?)
Vladimir:
It seems you are being respectful of the anonymity of these people, and very well, that. But you pique my curiosity… who were these people? What kind of group was it, and what was their explicit irrationality all about?
I can think of a few groups that might fit this mold, but the peculiar way you describe them makes me think you have something very specific and odd in mind. Children of the Almighty Cthulu?
I’ll describe three most interesting cases.
Number One is a Russian guy, now in his late 40s, with a spectacular youth. Among his trades were smuggling (during the Soviet era he smuggled brandy from Kazakhstan to Russia in the water system of a railway car), teaching in a ghetto college (where he inadvertently tamed a class of delinquents by hurling a wrench at their leader), leading a programming lab in an industrial institute, starting the first 3D visualization company in our city, reselling TV advertising time at a great margin (which he obtained by undercover deals involving key TV people and some outright gangsters), and saving the world by trying to find venture funding for a savant inventor who supposedly had a technology enabling geothermal energy extraction (I also worked together with them on this project). He was capable of totally crazy things, such as harpooning a wall portrait of a notorious Caucasus clanlord in a room full of his followers. He had lots of money during his successful periods, but was unable to convert this into a longer-term success.
Number Two is a deaf-mute woman, now in her 40s, who owns and runs a web development company. Her speech is distorted, she reads people by the lips, and I wouldn’t rate her particularly attractive – but despite all this she is able to consistently score excellent development / outsourcing contracts with top nationwide brands. Unfortunately, she often forces totally weird decisions upon the development team – and when they try to convince her that the decisions are rubbish by appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’, she takes it as a direct attack on her status. A real example – she once actually imposed an official ban on criticizing her company, decisions of her company, employees and management of her company, partners of her company, products of her company and everything else directly or indirectly related to her company in all communication channels (Skype, bug trackers, IMs, phone conversations, forums etc.)!
Number Three is the most spectacular one – a Russian guy of Jewish descent, around 30, an avid status seeker with an alpha-male attitude who owns and runs several web / game outsourcing companies, plus has a high-level, high-status management/consultancy job in a well-known nationwide online company. He is almost always able to somehow secure funding for his companies and projects, including those which I personally wouldn’t consider marketable. He lives in several cities at once, is excellent at remote leadership and hiring, and is quick to act – when he learns of a talented programming or art team he could potentially partner with, he gets on a plane just to meet them in person.
It was this guy who made me seriously wonder about how immensely weird people’s worldviews can be. This guy constructs his worldview by cherry-picking pieces that appeal to his sense of truth from Abrahamic religions (excluding Islam and the Old Testament), Eastern teachings and, if I remember correctly, even fiction. He hates concepts like ‘logic’, ‘science’, ‘fact’ and ‘reality’ with a passion, and believes that they are evil concepts designed by Anglo-Saxons to corrode ‘good’ worldviews (such as the New-Testament Christian one), and he is actively protecting his worldview from being corroded by evil ideas. Here’s an actual example of his reasoning: “Dawkins is an Anglo-Saxon, and all Anglo-Saxons are evil liars, therefore all ideas Dawkins advocates are evil lies, therefore evolution is a lie and is evil.” He believes that The Enemy himself is sponsoring the evolutionary science by actually providing money, fame and other goods to its proponents. He is sincerely unable to understand how people can be genuinely altruistic without a religious upbringing (and of course, he doesn’t want to consider things like mirror neurons).
So, it was this guy who made me ask myself questions like ‘What is my definition of truth?’
Thanks, Vladimir. You have interesting friends!
How do you translate that into a question of definition of truth? The third guy is sufficiently rational to be successful, I guess he’s got excellent native intelligence allowing him to correctly judge people or influence their decisions, and that his verbal descriptions of his beliefs are mostly rationalization, not hurting his performance too much. If he was a rationalist, he’d probably be even more successful (or he’d find a different occupation).
Yes, the guy is smart, swift-thinking and quick to act when it comes to getting projects up from the ground, connecting the right people and getting funding from nowhere (much less so when it comes to technical details and fine-grained planning). His actual decisions are effective, regardless of the stuff he has in the conscious part of his head.
(Actually quite a lot of people whose ‘spoken’ belief systems are suboptimal or plain weird are perfectly able to drive cars, run companies, avoid tigers and otherwise deal with the reality effectively.)
But can we call such ‘hardware-accelerated’ decisions rational? I don’t know.
Regarding your question. We had obvious disagreements with this guy, and I spent some time thinking about how can we resolve them. As a result, I decided that trying to resolve them (on a conscious level of course) is futile unless we have an agreement about fundamental things—what we define as truth, and which methods can we use to derive truths from other truths.
I didn’t think much about this issue before I met him (a scientific, or more specifically, Popperian worldview was enough for me), and this was the first time I had to consciously think about the issue. I even doubt I knew the meaning of the term ‘epistemology’ back then :)
Rings, what groups did you have in mind?
I have also noticed that people who good at manipulating and interacting with people are bad at manipulating and interacting with objective reality, and vice versa.
The key difference is that the politicals are ultimately dependent on the realists, but not vice versa.