The question is whether people who prioritize social-position/status-based arguments over actual reality were going to contribute anything meaningful to begin with.
The rationalist community has been built on, among other things, the recognition that human species is systematically broken when it comes to epistemic rationality. Why think that someone who fails this deeply wouldn’t continue failing at epistemic rationality at every step even once they’ve already joined?
Why think that someone who fails this deeply wouldn’t continue failing at epistemic rationality at every step even once they’ve already joined?
I think making the assumption that anyone who isn’t in our community is failing to think rationally is itself not great epistemics. It’s not irrational at all to refrain from engaging with the ideas of a community you believe to be vaguely insane. After all, I suspect you haven’t looked all that deeply into the accuracy of the views of the Church of Scientology, and that’s not a failure on your part, since there’s little chance you’ll gain much of value for your time if you did. There are many, many, many groups out there who sound intelligent at first glance, but when seriously engaged with fall apart. Likewise, there are those groups which sound insane at first, but actually have deep truths to teach (I’d place some forms of Zen Buddhism under this category). It makes a lot of sense to trust your intuition on this sort of thing, if you don’t want to get sucked into cults or time-sinks.
The question is whether people who prioritize social-position/status-based arguments over actual reality were going to contribute anything meaningful to begin with.
The rationalist community has been built on, among other things, the recognition that human species is systematically broken when it comes to epistemic rationality. Why think that someone who fails this deeply wouldn’t continue failing at epistemic rationality at every step even once they’ve already joined?
I think making the assumption that anyone who isn’t in our community is failing to think rationally is itself not great epistemics. It’s not irrational at all to refrain from engaging with the ideas of a community you believe to be vaguely insane. After all, I suspect you haven’t looked all that deeply into the accuracy of the views of the Church of Scientology, and that’s not a failure on your part, since there’s little chance you’ll gain much of value for your time if you did. There are many, many, many groups out there who sound intelligent at first glance, but when seriously engaged with fall apart. Likewise, there are those groups which sound insane at first, but actually have deep truths to teach (I’d place some forms of Zen Buddhism under this category). It makes a lot of sense to trust your intuition on this sort of thing, if you don’t want to get sucked into cults or time-sinks.
I didn’t talk about “anyone who isn’t in our community,” but about
It’s epistemically irrational if I’m implying the ideas are false and if this judgment isn’t born from interacting with the ideas themselves but with