The average person has a defense system against many types of abuse, which works like this: they get an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, then they make up some crazy rationalization why they need to avoid that thing, and then they avoid the thing. (Or maybe the last two steps happen in a different order.) Problem solved.
A novice rationalist stops trusting the old defense system, but doesn’t yet have an adequate new system to replace it. So they end up quite defenseless… especially when facing a predator who specializes at exploiting novice rationalists. (“As a rationalist, you should be ashamed of listening to your gut feeling if you cannot immediately support it by a peer-reviewed research. Now listen to my clever argument why you should obey me and give me whatever I want from you. As a rationalist, you are only allowed to defend yourself by winning a verbal battle against me, following the rules I made up.”)
Not sure what would be the best way to protect potential victims against this. I consider myself quite immune to this type of attack, because I already had previous experience with manipulation before I joined the rationalist community, and I try to listen to my instincts even when I cannot provide a satisfactory verbal translation. I am not ashamed to say that I reached some conclusion by “intuition”, even if that typically invites ridicule. I don’t trust verbal arguments too much, considering that every rationalization is also a convincingly sounding verbal argument. Whenever someone tells me “as a rationalist, you should [privilege my hypothesis because I have provided a clever argument in favor of it]”, I just sigh. You can’t use my identity as a rationalist against me, because if you say “most rationalists do X”, I can simply say “well, maybe most rationalists are wrong” or “maybe I am not really a good rationalist” and I actually mean it. -- But my original point here was not to brag; rather to express regret that I cannot teach this attitude to others, to help them build a new defense system against abuse.
Related: Reason as memetic immune disorder
The average person has a defense system against many types of abuse, which works like this: they get an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, then they make up some crazy rationalization why they need to avoid that thing, and then they avoid the thing. (Or maybe the last two steps happen in a different order.) Problem solved.
A novice rationalist stops trusting the old defense system, but doesn’t yet have an adequate new system to replace it. So they end up quite defenseless… especially when facing a predator who specializes at exploiting novice rationalists. (“As a rationalist, you should be ashamed of listening to your gut feeling if you cannot immediately support it by a peer-reviewed research. Now listen to my clever argument why you should obey me and give me whatever I want from you. As a rationalist, you are only allowed to defend yourself by winning a verbal battle against me, following the rules I made up.”)
Not sure what would be the best way to protect potential victims against this. I consider myself quite immune to this type of attack, because I already had previous experience with manipulation before I joined the rationalist community, and I try to listen to my instincts even when I cannot provide a satisfactory verbal translation. I am not ashamed to say that I reached some conclusion by “intuition”, even if that typically invites ridicule. I don’t trust verbal arguments too much, considering that every rationalization is also a convincingly sounding verbal argument. Whenever someone tells me “as a rationalist, you should [privilege my hypothesis because I have provided a clever argument in favor of it]”, I just sigh. You can’t use my identity as a rationalist against me, because if you say “most rationalists do X”, I can simply say “well, maybe most rationalists are wrong” or “maybe I am not really a good rationalist” and I actually mean it. -- But my original point here was not to brag; rather to express regret that I cannot teach this attitude to others, to help them build a new defense system against abuse.