/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

>>7038

/r/slatestarcodex is an absolute cesspool. I would say I'm afraid of catching autism, but the retarted myopia is probably worse. There but for the grace of God…

>>7038

>lebbit

>>7039

>>7039

eh call the consensus cluster around the ideas of a few particular blogers the rationalist community since that's what it actually is and think of another word for people who are super diligent in trying to weigh their evidence against their biases?

aspiring rationalist already fits the bill

>>7038

>complains that /ratanon/ is tribalistic nonsense

>posts on /r/slatestarcodex

Rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph.

>>7044

gtfo /ratanon/

>>7045

It's a quote from senpai: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/

>>7046

being a rationalist means not taking anyone's word just on the basis of them being popular

>>7047

Being rationalist means using big boy words and being smug about it.

Rationalism is the spiritual method of transforming the negative energy of complicated problems into the white light of moaning vague engineer jargon while you cum on a globe.

Basically rationalism as used here is a way for people who're smart at some mechanical or technical stuff to feel like they can apply those methods and skills to fields they're not familiar with without having to do any of the actual work or even learn anything outside of what they're comfortable with. It's the armchair political and cultural theorizing of the 19th century gentleman set in the modern era. To do anything resembling what rationalists pretend to do seriously would require such work as to make it almost a second career, and based on the accounts of people who do seriously work in these fields, it would require a constant feeling of ignorance and uncertainty that limits the fun exercise of solution-crafting that seems to be one of the main appeals of the rationalism tag.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/crd/only_say_rational_when_you_cant_eliminate_the_word/

Being a rationalist means a 15 point reduction in the minimum IQ required for me to find your thoughts interesting.

>>7052

A full standard deviation seems wildly unreasonable. You're just going to get someone parroting the party line without understanding it. Doesn't matter which party line.

You can have a good conversation with someone that's not terribly bright, but not in the realm of ideas. Stick to their knowledge and life experiences that don't overlap with yours.

>>7050

is it actually though? I've heard it repeated so often I've begun to take it for granted but has anyone "rationalist" actually done the embarrassing mad scientist things people keep accusing them of?

it seems like exactly the sort of trite folk wisdom that always comes up when someone with a technical background suggests something novel- that they're confused because they've done some much math that they forgotten how the world really works (in a way only those with an understand of 16th century english classics can truly grasp)

>>7054

People do it to an annoying degree in the SSC comments. It's not exactly hurting anyone, but it's embarassing. Of course there are a lot of rationalists that know better, too. So it's upsetting to see people tar rationalists as a whole with the accusation. But if you're just some outsider that no more feels the need to be "fair" to rationalists than he feels the need to be fair to any other identifiable group, like hacker news posters, or fans of homestuck, or javascript programmers… Then it feels like a reasonable accusation to make.

I always find it amusing that the very same people criticize the social sciences as insufficiently rigorous and constantly indulge in endless armchair theorizing in the social science subjects.

>>7056

Findings in the social sciences have implications for public policy, and many questions of public policy demand some sort of answer *now* rather than after you've carried out enough truly rigorous experiments to find the theoretically optimal answer. In the end you're left either deciding to stick with the findings of social science academia despite its flaws, or giving some amount of epistemic weight to your own speculations about how human beings work based on your own (anecdotal) experience of how people work.

>>7057

First option one is epistemologically superior and second I don't think the endless armchair theorizing is driven by desperate calls by public servants for blog comment posters to come up with answers.

>>7059

The guy that hangs around with rationalists, but is too cool for big words. Hmm.

>>7055

I generally apply stricter definitions to groups and for that matter "doing" than "people posting comments" so that's my source of confusion

has anyone actually attempted to change something in the real world at all?

that seems like a much more salient critique come to think of it

They don't want a hero, They just want a martyr ,a statue to raise!