Seriously, in what sense did rationalists “pwn covid”? Did they build businesses that could reliably survive a year of person-to-person contact being restricted across the planet? Did they successfully lobby governments to invest properly in pandemic response before anything happened? Did they invest in coronavirus vaccine research so that we had a vaccine ready before the pandemic started? Did they start a massive public information campaign that changed people’s behaviour and stopped the disease from spreading exponentially? Did they all move to an island nation where they could continue life as normal by shutting the border?
Honestly, it seems pretty distasteful to say that anyone ‘pwned’ a disease that has now killed over 1 million people, but on the face of it, it’s also pretty ridiculous. So far as I can tell, a small handful of people divested a small amount of their stock portfolio, and a bunch of people wrote some articles about how the disease was likely to be a big deal, mostly around the time other people were also starting to come to the same conclusion. By late February it was probably already too late to start stockpiling for a quarantine without effectively taking those supplies away from someone else. Honestly, the practical benefits of being a couple of weeks ahead of the curve on this seem pretty minimal.
(Also, to be clear, it’s not obvious you were that much ahead of the curve. The Vox article about ‘no handshakes please’ was written about 2 weeks before either of the ‘rationalist’ articles you link to, which implies that at least a good chunk of Silicon Valley was already taking it seriously)
I really think this is a big part of the reason that people don’t benefit nearly as much as you might initially think from ‘rationality’. There are huge benefits to going with the crowd, and huge coordination problems to be solved if you want to outperform the crowd. Sure, there are a handful of very impressive rationalists who seem to have done very impressive things, but there are a handful of very impressive people in pretty much any community built around any intellectual pursuit. I’m not sure I buy the premise that ‘explicit rationality’ is nearly as good as you think it is.
FWIW I left a decent job that required regular air travel to deep red “COVID is a liberal hoax” areas of the US based heavily on content here. I had alternatives lined up but I probably would’ve stuck it out otherwise and I think that would’ve been a mistake.
I’m actually confused by that response, and I don’t think it’s really part of your best attempt to explain what you meant by ‘rationalists pwned covid’. I’ll try to explain why I’m unimpressed with that response below, but I think we’re in danger of getting into a sort of ‘point-scoring’ talking past each other. Obviously there were a few rhetorical flourishes in my original response, but I think the biggest part of what I’m trying to say is that the actual personal benefits to most people of being ahead of the curve on thinking about the pandemic were pretty minimal, and I think avoiding infection would fall in that ‘minimal benefit’ bucket for most of us.
I think we can be a bit more concrete—I think the actual personal benefits to either you or me of being aware of what was happening with COVID slightly before everyone else were pretty minimal. I really liked your article from February, and I really think the points you were making about conformity bias are probably the strongest part of your argument that rationality has practical uses, but you pretty much said yourself in that post that the actual, practical benefits were not that big:
“Aside from selling the equities, all the prep I’ve done was to stock a month of necessities so I can work from home and to hold off on booking flights for a trip I had planned for April.”
And I think (and this is where we probably differ) that this is pretty typical of the sort of topics where you can get the right answer using explicit reason.
To address the actual claim that rationalist didn’t get infected (although, as I said, I don’t think it really gets the meat of what you were saying originally).
First, I think it’s probably not true, there are two main reasons for this: one, there are 255k confirmed COVID cases in New York City, so if there are 10 million people in the city, and 25% of them have had COVID, then only 10% of the people who’ve had it know they’ve had it; two, I’m about 85% sure that I remember a post going round Bay Area rationalist Facebook friends in March about someone who had been to a party at a group house having a positive test.
Second, if it is (even proportionally) true, I think it’s probably mostly down to demographics. I play in a regular bridge game with some Scottish and English internationals, and as far as I’m aware, none of them have had COVID. I think this is probably more to do with the fact that very few bridge players work in the service sector, and almost all of us were able to work from home during a pandemic than any particular perspicacity on our part.
Third, as I said above, it’s a pretty low bar. If you’re rich enough (and don’t work at a hospital), avoiding personally getting infected is relatively straightforward, and while obviously it has some benefits, I don’t think it would be enough of an incentive to convince me to take on a whole new worldview.
Third, as I said above, it’s a pretty low bar. If you’re rich enough (and don’t work at a hospital), avoiding personally getting infected is relatively straightforward, and while obviously it has some benefits, I don’t think it would be enough of an incentive to convince me to take on a whole new worldview.
My personal experience is consistent with this take, for what it’s worth. I think that “rationalists didn’t get COVID” is indeed mostly due to substantially higher average income (perhaps not even among ‘rationalists’ but specifically among Jacob’s friends/acquaintances).
The best startup people were similarly early, and I respect them a lot for that. If you know of another community or person that publicly said the straightforward and true things in public back in February, I am interested to know who they are and what other surprising claims they make.
I do know a lot of rationalists who put together solid projects and have done some fairly useful things in response to the pandemic – like epidemicforecasting.org and microcovid.org, and Zvi’s and Sarah C’s writing, and the LW covid links database, and I heard that Median group did a bunch of useful things, and so on. Your comment makes me think I should make a full list somewhere to highlight the work they’ve all done, even if they weren’t successful.
I wouldn’t myself say we’ve pwned covid, I’d say some longer and more complicated thing by default that points to our many flaws while highlighting our strengths. I do think our collective epistemic process was superior to that of most other communities, in that we spoke about it plainly (simulacra level 1) in public in January/February, and many of us worked on relevant projects.
I didn’t really see much public discussion early outside of epidemiology Twitter. I’m married to an epidemiologist who stocked our flat with masks in December when there were 59 confirmed cases in Wuhan, and we bought enough tins of food to eat for a few weeks in January, as well as upgrading our work-from-home set up before things sold out. Although I completely failed to make the connection and move my pension out of equities, that doesn’t actually seem to have cost me very much in the long run (for those keeping count, S&P 500 is up 17% year-on-year).
(The biggest very early warning sign, apparently, was that when there were 59 cases China was still claiming there was no person-to-person transmission, which seemed implausible).
I actually am impressed by how well the Lesswrong-sphere did epistemically. People here seem to have been taking COVID seriously before most other people were, but as I’ve tried to explain a bit more above, I’m not sure how much this good this did anyone personally. If the argument is ‘listen to rationalists when they say weird things because they’re more often right when they say weird things that most other people’, then I think I’m on board. If the argument is ‘try explicit rationality, it will make your life noticeably better in measurable ways’, then I’m less convinced, and I think these really are distinct claims.
PS—your links seem to be broken, it’s easy enough to follow them, as you gave full URL’s, just thought I’d let you know.
(Also, I don’t get the S&P being up so much, am generally pretty confused by that, and updated further that I don’t know how to get information out of the stock market.)
I think epistemics is indeed the first metric I care about for LessWrongers. If we had ignored covid or been confident it was not a big deal, I would now feel pretty doomy about us, but I do think we did indeed do quite well on it. I could talk about how we discussed masks, precautions, microcovids, long-lasting respiratory issues, and so on, but I don’t feel like going on at length about it right now. Thanks for saying what you said there.
Now, I don’t think you/others should update on this a ton, and perhaps we can do a survey to check, but my suspicion is that LWers and Rationalists have gotten covid way, way less than the baseline. Like, maybe an order of magnitude less. I know family who got it, I know whole other communities who got it, but I know hundreds of rationalists and I know so few cases among them.
Of my extended circle of rationalist friends, I know of one person who got it, and this was due to them living in a different community with different epistemic standards, and I think my friend fairly viscerally lost some trust in that community for not taking the issue seriously early on. But otherwise, I just know somewhere between 100-200 people who didn’t get it (a bunch of people who were in NY like Jacob, Zvi, etc), people who did basic microcovid calculations, started working from home as soon as the first case of community-transmission was reported in their area, had stockpiled food in February, updated later on that surface-transmission was not a big deal so stopped washing their deliveries, etcetera and so forth.
I also knew a number of people who in February were doing fairly serious research trying to figure out the risk factors for their family, putting out bounties for others to help read the research, and so on, and who made a serious effort to get their family safe.
There have been some private threads in my rationalist social circles where we’ve said “Have people personally caught the virus in this social circle despite taking serious quarantine precautions?” and there’ve been several reports of “I know a friend from school who got it” or “I know a family member who got it”, and there’s been one or two “I got a virus in February before quarantining but the symptoms don’t match”, but overall I just know almost no people who got it, and a lot of people taking quarantine precautions before it was cool. I also know several people who managed to get tests and took them (#SecurityMindset), and who came up negative, as expected.
One of the main reasons I’m not very confident is that I think it’s somewhat badly incentivized for people to report that they personally got it. While it’s positive for the common good, and it lets us know about community rates and so on, I think people expect they will be judged a non-zero amount for getting it, and can also trick themselves with plausible deniability because testing is bad (“Probably it was just some other virus, I don’t know”). So there’s likely some amount of underreporting, correlated with the people who didn’t take it seriously in the first place. (If this weren’t an issue, I would had said more like 500-1500 of my extended friends and acquaintances.)
And, even if it’s true, I have concerns that we acted with appropriate caution in the first few months, but then when more evidence came in and certain things turned out to be unnecessary (e.g. cleaning deliveries, reheating delivery food, etc) I think people stuck those out much too long and some maybe still are.
Nonetheless, my current belief is that rationality did help me and a lot of my 100s of rationalist friends and acquaintances straightforwardly avoid several weeks and months of life lost in expectation, just by doing some basic fermi estimates about the trajectory and consequences of the coronavirus, and reading/writing their info on LessWrong. If you want you and your family to be safe from weird things like this in the future, I think that practicing rationality (and being on LessWrong) is a pretty good way to do this.
(Naturally, being married to an epidemiologist is another good way, but I can only have one spouse, and there are lots of weird problems heading our way from other areas too. Oh for the world where the only problem facing us was pandemics.)
(Also thx, I think I have fixed the links.)
Added: I didn’t see your reply to Jacobian before writing this. Feel free to refer me to parts of that.
Hey Ben, given that you are able to keep track of 100s of friends and acquaintances, and assuming that you also have lots of other friends and acquaintances who are not rationalists but similar in other respects (probably: young; high income and education; jobs that can be transformed to remote jobs if they aren’t already; not too uncomfortable with staying at home because they do not spend every weekend in a soccer stadium or dancing all night?):
How large do you estimate the differential impact of “being rationalist” to be?
there are two sides to an options contract, when to buy and when to sell. Wei Dai did well on the first half but updated in the comments on losing most of the gains on the second half. This isn’t a criticism, it’s hard.
Is “some of us” more than Wei Dai? Because it seems to me that only Wei Dai is mentioned as an example but it is implied that more people profited—not only by you, but in general when I see that claim.
I’d stress the idea here that finding a “solution” to the pandemic is easy and preventing it early on based on evidence also is.
Most people could implement a solution better than those currently affecting the US and Europe, if they were a global tsar with infinite power.
But solving the coordination problems involved in implementing that solution is hard, that’s the part that nerds solving and nobody is closer to a solution there.
I saw the supply chain disruptions coming and made final preparations for it, I saw layoffs coming in my aviation-related job so I updated my resume, took a good severance package, and found a new, remote-based job with significantly higher pay. And yes, I also significantly re-balanced my portfolio and took advantage of the crash early this year. In all, I expect about 40% additional income/unrealized gains this year than last. To me that’s more than minimal.
Rationalists that were paying attention get the 1st chance of understanding the implications and making moves (big or small) before a mass of people finally took it seriously in the US. I’ll admit part of it is certainly luck since I can’t really time the market or precisely know how gov’t policies and actions will affect my stocks.
It’s also hard to know how much of that on my part was explicit reason, I was certainly reading up on the literature about it, but there was not a ton of data. I did use some social cognition based on the Chinese response under the presumption that they knew more about it since it originated there.
I don’t think the COVID response is even the best measure to judge the benefits of being rational, it’s just one part of it. If you want to solve problems, you have to be rational… being irrational is a bad way to solve problems.
I have very mixed feelings about this website. On the one hand, it’s got interesting articles and reading HPMOR was very entertaining. But, on the other, there’s so many people who are just writing posts that are embarrassingly the opposite of what they claim they are all about: self-consciousness, in particular.
Me and my friends are rational, that is, all that is right and correct, by definition, and we call ourselves Rationalists. Can’t you see the paradox in this claim? And yet I thought people here didn’t find Spock rational, and correctly assessed that his character is “defined” as such by the story, but it fails to fulfill itself. As a human being you will always fail. The website is called “less wrong”, for a random divinity’s sake. It should be about striving to be less wrong while admitting we cannot avoid failure, not about jerking each other off about how rational and better we are than others. And yet…
In general I am highly suspicious of any lover of truth who will willingly call themselves a sophist: for a Rationalist, there is little praise as high as being a Rationalist, and therefore calling yourself and the people who agree with you with this name is very much patting your own back.
Especially when using to criticize and compare yourself to people you disagree with.
Having said this, there are interesting things in this post too. I’m not saying it’s completely bad, but a lot of the language and framing here leads me to think there is also a lot of unnecessary arrogance. I just wanna say, more actual thinking, less implicit self-praise.
Seriously, in what sense did rationalists “pwn covid”? Did they build businesses that could reliably survive a year of person-to-person contact being restricted across the planet? Did they successfully lobby governments to invest properly in pandemic response before anything happened? Did they invest in coronavirus vaccine research so that we had a vaccine ready before the pandemic started? Did they start a massive public information campaign that changed people’s behaviour and stopped the disease from spreading exponentially? Did they all move to an island nation where they could continue life as normal by shutting the border?
Honestly, it seems pretty distasteful to say that anyone ‘pwned’ a disease that has now killed over 1 million people, but on the face of it, it’s also pretty ridiculous. So far as I can tell, a small handful of people divested a small amount of their stock portfolio, and a bunch of people wrote some articles about how the disease was likely to be a big deal, mostly around the time other people were also starting to come to the same conclusion. By late February it was probably already too late to start stockpiling for a quarantine without effectively taking those supplies away from someone else. Honestly, the practical benefits of being a couple of weeks ahead of the curve on this seem pretty minimal.
(Also, to be clear, it’s not obvious you were that much ahead of the curve. The Vox article about ‘no handshakes please’ was written about 2 weeks before either of the ‘rationalist’ articles you link to, which implies that at least a good chunk of Silicon Valley was already taking it seriously)
I really think this is a big part of the reason that people don’t benefit nearly as much as you might initially think from ‘rationality’. There are huge benefits to going with the crowd, and huge coordination problems to be solved if you want to outperform the crowd. Sure, there are a handful of very impressive rationalists who seem to have done very impressive things, but there are a handful of very impressive people in pretty much any community built around any intellectual pursuit. I’m not sure I buy the premise that ‘explicit rationality’ is nearly as good as you think it is.
FWIW I left a decent job that required regular air travel to deep red “COVID is a liberal hoax” areas of the US based heavily on content here. I had alternatives lined up but I probably would’ve stuck it out otherwise and I think that would’ve been a mistake.
Thanks for sharing this info. It’s helpful for writers in the community to hear about these sorts of effects their writing has :)
We didn’t get COVID, for starters. I live in NYC, where approximately 25% of the population got sick but no rationalists that I’m aware of did.
I’m actually confused by that response, and I don’t think it’s really part of your best attempt to explain what you meant by ‘rationalists pwned covid’. I’ll try to explain why I’m unimpressed with that response below, but I think we’re in danger of getting into a sort of ‘point-scoring’ talking past each other. Obviously there were a few rhetorical flourishes in my original response, but I think the biggest part of what I’m trying to say is that the actual personal benefits to most people of being ahead of the curve on thinking about the pandemic were pretty minimal, and I think avoiding infection would fall in that ‘minimal benefit’ bucket for most of us.
I think we can be a bit more concrete—I think the actual personal benefits to either you or me of being aware of what was happening with COVID slightly before everyone else were pretty minimal. I really liked your article from February, and I really think the points you were making about conformity bias are probably the strongest part of your argument that rationality has practical uses, but you pretty much said yourself in that post that the actual, practical benefits were not that big:
“Aside from selling the equities, all the prep I’ve done was to stock a month of necessities so I can work from home and to hold off on booking flights for a trip I had planned for April.”
And I think (and this is where we probably differ) that this is pretty typical of the sort of topics where you can get the right answer using explicit reason.
To address the actual claim that rationalist didn’t get infected (although, as I said, I don’t think it really gets the meat of what you were saying originally).
First, I think it’s probably not true, there are two main reasons for this: one, there are 255k confirmed COVID cases in New York City, so if there are 10 million people in the city, and 25% of them have had COVID, then only 10% of the people who’ve had it know they’ve had it; two, I’m about 85% sure that I remember a post going round Bay Area rationalist Facebook friends in March about someone who had been to a party at a group house having a positive test.
Second, if it is (even proportionally) true, I think it’s probably mostly down to demographics. I play in a regular bridge game with some Scottish and English internationals, and as far as I’m aware, none of them have had COVID. I think this is probably more to do with the fact that very few bridge players work in the service sector, and almost all of us were able to work from home during a pandemic than any particular perspicacity on our part.
Third, as I said above, it’s a pretty low bar. If you’re rich enough (and don’t work at a hospital), avoiding personally getting infected is relatively straightforward, and while obviously it has some benefits, I don’t think it would be enough of an incentive to convince me to take on a whole new worldview.
My personal experience is consistent with this take, for what it’s worth. I think that “rationalists didn’t get COVID” is indeed mostly due to substantially higher average income (perhaps not even among ‘rationalists’ but specifically among Jacob’s friends/acquaintances).
Something about that seems plausible to me. I’ll think on it more...
The best startup people were similarly early, and I respect them a lot for that. If you know of another community or person that publicly said the straightforward and true things in public back in February, I am interested to know who they are and what other surprising claims they make.
I do know a lot of rationalists who put together solid projects and have done some fairly useful things in response to the pandemic – like epidemicforecasting.org and microcovid.org, and Zvi’s and Sarah C’s writing, and the LW covid links database, and I heard that Median group did a bunch of useful things, and so on. Your comment makes me think I should make a full list somewhere to highlight the work they’ve all done, even if they weren’t successful.
I wouldn’t myself say we’ve pwned covid, I’d say some longer and more complicated thing by default that points to our many flaws while highlighting our strengths. I do think our collective epistemic process was superior to that of most other communities, in that we spoke about it plainly (simulacra level 1) in public in January/February, and many of us worked on relevant projects.
I didn’t really see much public discussion early outside of epidemiology Twitter. I’m married to an epidemiologist who stocked our flat with masks in December when there were 59 confirmed cases in Wuhan, and we bought enough tins of food to eat for a few weeks in January, as well as upgrading our work-from-home set up before things sold out. Although I completely failed to make the connection and move my pension out of equities, that doesn’t actually seem to have cost me very much in the long run (for those keeping count, S&P 500 is up 17% year-on-year).
(The biggest very early warning sign, apparently, was that when there were 59 cases China was still claiming there was no person-to-person transmission, which seemed implausible).
I actually am impressed by how well the Lesswrong-sphere did epistemically. People here seem to have been taking COVID seriously before most other people were, but as I’ve tried to explain a bit more above, I’m not sure how much this good this did anyone personally. If the argument is ‘listen to rationalists when they say weird things because they’re more often right when they say weird things that most other people’, then I think I’m on board. If the argument is ‘try explicit rationality, it will make your life noticeably better in measurable ways’, then I’m less convinced, and I think these really are distinct claims.
PS—your links seem to be broken, it’s easy enough to follow them, as you gave full URL’s, just thought I’d let you know.
Good on your spouse! Very impressed.
(Also, I don’t get the S&P being up so much, am generally pretty confused by that, and updated further that I don’t know how to get information out of the stock market.)
I think epistemics is indeed the first metric I care about for LessWrongers. If we had ignored covid or been confident it was not a big deal, I would now feel pretty doomy about us, but I do think we did indeed do quite well on it. I could talk about how we discussed masks, precautions, microcovids, long-lasting respiratory issues, and so on, but I don’t feel like going on at length about it right now. Thanks for saying what you said there.
Now, I don’t think you/others should update on this a ton, and perhaps we can do a survey to check, but my suspicion is that LWers and Rationalists have gotten covid way, way less than the baseline. Like, maybe an order of magnitude less. I know family who got it, I know whole other communities who got it, but I know hundreds of rationalists and I know so few cases among them.
Of my extended circle of rationalist friends, I know of one person who got it, and this was due to them living in a different community with different epistemic standards, and I think my friend fairly viscerally lost some trust in that community for not taking the issue seriously early on. But otherwise, I just know somewhere between 100-200 people who didn’t get it (a bunch of people who were in NY like Jacob, Zvi, etc), people who did basic microcovid calculations, started working from home as soon as the first case of community-transmission was reported in their area, had stockpiled food in February, updated later on that surface-transmission was not a big deal so stopped washing their deliveries, etcetera and so forth.
I also knew a number of people who in February were doing fairly serious research trying to figure out the risk factors for their family, putting out bounties for others to help read the research, and so on, and who made a serious effort to get their family safe.
There have been some private threads in my rationalist social circles where we’ve said “Have people personally caught the virus in this social circle despite taking serious quarantine precautions?” and there’ve been several reports of “I know a friend from school who got it” or “I know a family member who got it”, and there’s been one or two “I got a virus in February before quarantining but the symptoms don’t match”, but overall I just know almost no people who got it, and a lot of people taking quarantine precautions before it was cool. I also know several people who managed to get tests and took them (#SecurityMindset), and who came up negative, as expected.
One of the main reasons I’m not very confident is that I think it’s somewhat badly incentivized for people to report that they personally got it. While it’s positive for the common good, and it lets us know about community rates and so on, I think people expect they will be judged a non-zero amount for getting it, and can also trick themselves with plausible deniability because testing is bad (“Probably it was just some other virus, I don’t know”). So there’s likely some amount of underreporting, correlated with the people who didn’t take it seriously in the first place. (If this weren’t an issue, I would had said more like 500-1500 of my extended friends and acquaintances.)
And, even if it’s true, I have concerns that we acted with appropriate caution in the first few months, but then when more evidence came in and certain things turned out to be unnecessary (e.g. cleaning deliveries, reheating delivery food, etc) I think people stuck those out much too long and some maybe still are.
Nonetheless, my current belief is that rationality did help me and a lot of my 100s of rationalist friends and acquaintances straightforwardly avoid several weeks and months of life lost in expectation, just by doing some basic fermi estimates about the trajectory and consequences of the coronavirus, and reading/writing their info on LessWrong. If you want you and your family to be safe from weird things like this in the future, I think that practicing rationality (and being on LessWrong) is a pretty good way to do this.
(Naturally, being married to an epidemiologist is another good way, but I can only have one spouse, and there are lots of weird problems heading our way from other areas too. Oh for the world where the only problem facing us was pandemics.)
(Also thx, I think I have fixed the links.)
Added: I didn’t see your reply to Jacobian before writing this. Feel free to refer me to parts of that.
Hey Ben, given that you are able to keep track of 100s of friends and acquaintances, and assuming that you also have lots of other friends and acquaintances who are not rationalists but similar in other respects (probably: young; high income and education; jobs that can be transformed to remote jobs if they aren’t already; not too uncomfortable with staying at home because they do not spend every weekend in a soccer stadium or dancing all night?):
How large do you estimate the differential impact of “being rationalist” to be?
It’s a good question. I’ll see if I can write a reply in the next few days...
I mean some of us made buckets of money off of the chaos, so theres that.
there are two sides to an options contract, when to buy and when to sell. Wei Dai did well on the first half but updated in the comments on losing most of the gains on the second half. This isn’t a criticism, it’s hard.
Is “some of us” more than Wei Dai? Because it seems to me that only Wei Dai is mentioned as an example but it is implied that more people profited—not only by you, but in general when I see that claim.
(I know of 1-2 other examples where people did something like double their net wealth.)
I know someone who ~5x’d.
I’d stress the idea here that finding a “solution” to the pandemic is easy and preventing it early on based on evidence also is.
Most people could implement a solution better than those currently affecting the US and Europe, if they were a global tsar with infinite power.
But solving the coordination problems involved in implementing that solution is hard, that’s the part that nerds solving and nobody is closer to a solution there.
I saw the supply chain disruptions coming and made final preparations for it, I saw layoffs coming in my aviation-related job so I updated my resume, took a good severance package, and found a new, remote-based job with significantly higher pay. And yes, I also significantly re-balanced my portfolio and took advantage of the crash early this year. In all, I expect about 40% additional income/unrealized gains this year than last. To me that’s more than minimal.
Rationalists that were paying attention get the 1st chance of understanding the implications and making moves (big or small) before a mass of people finally took it seriously in the US. I’ll admit part of it is certainly luck since I can’t really time the market or precisely know how gov’t policies and actions will affect my stocks.
It’s also hard to know how much of that on my part was explicit reason, I was certainly reading up on the literature about it, but there was not a ton of data. I did use some social cognition based on the Chinese response under the presumption that they knew more about it since it originated there.
I don’t think the COVID response is even the best measure to judge the benefits of being rational, it’s just one part of it. If you want to solve problems, you have to be rational… being irrational is a bad way to solve problems.
Thank you for this comment.
I have very mixed feelings about this website. On the one hand, it’s got interesting articles and reading HPMOR was very entertaining. But, on the other, there’s so many people who are just writing posts that are embarrassingly the opposite of what they claim they are all about: self-consciousness, in particular.
Me and my friends are rational, that is, all that is right and correct, by definition, and we call ourselves Rationalists. Can’t you see the paradox in this claim? And yet I thought people here didn’t find Spock rational, and correctly assessed that his character is “defined” as such by the story, but it fails to fulfill itself. As a human being you will always fail. The website is called “less wrong”, for a random divinity’s sake. It should be about striving to be less wrong while admitting we cannot avoid failure, not about jerking each other off about how rational and better we are than others. And yet…
In general I am highly suspicious of any lover of truth who will willingly call themselves a sophist: for a Rationalist, there is little praise as high as being a Rationalist, and therefore calling yourself and the people who agree with you with this name is very much patting your own back.
Especially when using to criticize and compare yourself to people you disagree with.
Having said this, there are interesting things in this post too. I’m not saying it’s completely bad, but a lot of the language and framing here leads me to think there is also a lot of unnecessary arrogance. I just wanna say, more actual thinking, less implicit self-praise.