I've had to argue over and over that there's no postrationalism with rationalism. The postrationalist perspective builds on what works about rationalism and then uses those tools without the confines of assuming the totalizing rationalist worldview.
But then inevitably the prerationalists show up and mistake postrationalism for their thing, and then we have to move on, because no one has yet cracked the nut of how to create a postrationalism that also solidly contains the rationalist parts it needs to function and can't be mistaken for prerationalism.
If rationalism is the steady removal of context in favour of the divine light of pure Reason, then it makes sense that there is one recurring rationalism.
But if post-rationalism is the recognition of the failure of rationalism and then seeking to add the context back in, then there could be infinitely many post-rationalisms based on what context gets added back in first.
San Fransisco rationalism can be formally equal to London rationalism or Delhi rationalism. But SF post-rat will not be equal to London post-rat or Delhi post-rat.
I've broken it up geographically but you could also do it by main interest e.g. meditation or by political tradition. I don't feel I should have to say why referring to TPOT is going to feel groundless in this situation.
So maybe looking for something labelled post-rationalism is less exciting than seeing post-rationalism in action in the world, as a real contextual thing.
This reminds me of your anti-philosophy thread. I agree with what you say about it but I'm not about to start a post-philosophy group. I'll just use my time better
Re: the question of whether more short fun scrappy vs considered longform: personally I value considered longform and think it's objectively better, but in actual practice I tend to park it for when I have more time, meaning I never get round to it. I am way more likely to read short scrappy stuff from an email or when I'm looking for a short nibble of distraction on my phone. So you have to weigh up whether you value something existing in finished form for posterity or being read and talked about in the present
This is helpful, thank you! Although your equivocation also matches mine :)
Tentatively, I’m planning to shift the mixture somewhat. That implies more short, fun pieces, partly to get something across, and partly as bait to hook readers into doing the work of tackling the long difficult ones.
I'd say that LW-adjacent subculture itself seems to be as much your cult as it is Yudkowsky's these days. Meditation, focusing, circling are about as prominent as getting worked up about bayesianism, interpretations of quantum mechanics or killer robots. Whether this has gotten them any closer to addressing fundamental problems of postmodernity remains to be seen...
I thought tpot and postrationalists were the same thing. Looking over their shoulder I admired their openness and the way they don't talk in the usual poisonous STEM way (ie only in one-upping/disagreements), but also they clearly have the same problems as the rationalists or other Berkeley people (tend to join cults, develop mental illnesses, friends all keep trying to convince you of scientific racism, etc).
Speaking of cults, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the recent Zizian debacle, which was basically a product of taking the tenets and practices of Rationalism way, way, too seriously (along with normal cult dynamics).
I'd like to think that if only these people had absorbed more metarationality a lot of tragedy could have been averted.
"Just based on its name and its most prominent interests, it’s easy to imagine the Rationalist Movement as a kind of empirically grounded alliance of engineers promoting the scientific method. And there are certainly groups underneath the big Rationalist umbrella for whom that is a fair description. But when you poke around a little bit--when you read about how “Rationalism” plays out in its communities in practice--the “movement” starts to feel a little less STEM and a lot more New Age: A suspect program for self-improvement, with existential stakes, a strong emphasis on self-experimentation, and a deleterious commitment to openness. In this sense its predecessors are not really the original enlightenment rationalists, but the dubious touchstones of ‘60s-hangover California--Scientology and Dianetics, Werner Erhard and est, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Manson Family."
Thanks, yes, I've had the Zizis in my feed quite a lot recently!
I'm not sure how much blame to attribute to LW rationalism in this particular case. Probably not much? Ziz & co are extreme outliers, and if they hadn't parasitized LW rationalism they might have done the same in Scientology or whatever.
That said, LW rationalism does repeatedly spawn malignant cults. None of the others as dramatically bad, but several that have seriously messed up quite a few people. It's well past coincidence at this point. Plus the rate of social dysfunction, flagrantly bad behavior, and serious mental health crises within the mainstream LW subculture is well above the norm.
A number of my friends are "in the helping professions" and have repeatedly worked to put back together the traumatized.
I sometimes get urgent phone calls like "Have you heard about [LW-spinoff group #27]? What can you tell me about them?" And I say "Oh dear, another rationalist blowup? I hope no one is hospitalized this time" and they say "You know that as a matter of professional ethics I can't comment, but what's scoop on [LW-spinoff group #27]?" Usually I know little, since I'm at least two hops removed from LW, but can confirm that yes it's another dubious LW spinoff group.
There's a number of plausible reasons to excuse LW from this. I mean, there was some similar stuff at MIT when we were students there decades ago! Maybe LW does not run above the base rate for associations of highly open STEM people.
I'm a longtime MOP of LW and I suspect "LW does not run above the base rate for associations of highly open STEM people" is true. The 'apocalyptic flavor' of LW probably doesn't help tho.
Given that reason, however wonderful it may be, is obviously only a part of human experience, even reason would have to concede that a philosophy centered only on reason would eventually fall apart or reach its limits.
By the naming conventions of English, the philosophy (or whatever you'd rather call it...) that emerges after the failure of X, without totally abandoning X is called "post-X".
Was gonna chicken out of commenting until I noticed the Sunless Sea reference and couldn't pass on an opportunity to evangelize Alexis Kennedy's more recent work on Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours: https://weatherfactory.biz/
But the comment I was chickening out of was getting distracted by the reference to the old geeks and MOPs post and wondering if you still stand by the subcultures-are-dead premise; I wrote a thing disagreeing with it a little while back that ended up being some foundational framing for how I think of entertainment culture nowadays: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/all-the-subcultures-are-undead
Thanks also for the link to your subcultures post, which I liked.
"Geeks MOPs and sociopaths" is itself somewhat undead. It was supposed to be one small piece of an extended explanation of subcultures, which is still in draft form. Maybe someday I'll finish it; maybe not!
I used the word "subculture" in a somewhat specific way, which has caused confusion. In this sense (common in academic sociology), a subculture is a total lifestyle package. Those are now rare outside closed cults.
Since those sorts of subcultures are now nearly non-existent, the word now refers to different sorts of groups that I'd call "fandoms," "hobby communities," or "scenes" instead. The distinction is important, I think, but drawing that out would/will take a substantial essay.
Ah! That makes sense, I'm almost entirely familiar with "subcultures" in the latter sense, and I suppose it's easy to confuse inasmuch as the former can also be thought of the latter. I like "neotribal" as an alternate description of the former, or maybe the latter?
Hmm, one of those.
I'm tempted to argue that there -is- a dominant "normie" subculture but it's definitely distinct from what would have been the dominant social culture as you describe in, say, the 60s. Good food for thought.
I continue to think you're too dismissive (or something along these lines) of 'LessWrong rationality'.
Aside from adopting the words/name 'rationality' and 'rationalism', it's not an intellectually naïve continuation of historical Rationalism – the original posts explicitly warn against making that mistake for one.
But I also consider you to be, intellectually (and even 'intellectual-aesthetically') a member of The Greater Rationality Sphere. All of your posts would be welcome on LessWrong and I think basically all of your ideas have been incorporated into 'LessWrong rationality' already.
One reason why I suspect LessWrong (reasonably) comes across as amateurish or naïve is that it was started by Eliezer to walk others thru not just his reasoning about the dangers of AI, but more so to walk them through what he considered all of the background material necessary to have sufficient context to follow his reasoning about AI and why it's dangerous. Presenting existing ideas to new audiences is laudable! And I think Eliezer was remarkably successful at doing so.
Another reason why I'm confused you're not more 'sympathetic' is that it seems EXTREMELY useful to guide people to a version of Rationality, even if it _didn't_ incorporate a lot of your insights about metarationality. I haven't found much, if any, valuable insights in the works of the 'postrationalists' because many, if not most, of them never seem to have reached 'rationality' – stage 4 in your adult development stage theory – in the first place. IME, they're LARPING as 'postrationalists' as part of a firmly 'communal' (stage 3) complex of behaviors, i.e. 'postrationalism is cool'.
(It also definitely seems to me that most 'Rationalists' are at stage 3 of development too – that's possibly/probably inevitable for any 'movement' of more than a few dozen people.)
I think you are right that many/most LW Rationalists and postrationalists act in stage 3 ways in their relationships. On the other hand, many/most think at stage 4 (or beyond) about STEM-ish stuff. This "lag" between the domains is very common for STEM-educated people.
From your post "Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence" (on Vividness):
> Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.
I think that's a big part of why LessWrong has been valuable, to me and many others. It's mostly about that exact transition – because that was then and is now probably the biggest bottleneck for promoting enough people to the necessary level to tackle the biggest and thorniest problems.
Yes, I think that’s right, and I agree it is valuable. I wish lots of things about the Rationalist subculture were different, but it may be the best-fit alternative available for some people. A decent university STEM education is probably better for far more; but that doesn’t work for everyone.
I've had to argue over and over that there's no postrationalism with rationalism. The postrationalist perspective builds on what works about rationalism and then uses those tools without the confines of assuming the totalizing rationalist worldview.
But then inevitably the prerationalists show up and mistake postrationalism for their thing, and then we have to move on, because no one has yet cracked the nut of how to create a postrationalism that also solidly contains the rationalist parts it needs to function and can't be mistaken for prerationalism.
That seems right, thank you!
Sounds like Wilber's pre-trans fallacy
If rationalism is the steady removal of context in favour of the divine light of pure Reason, then it makes sense that there is one recurring rationalism.
But if post-rationalism is the recognition of the failure of rationalism and then seeking to add the context back in, then there could be infinitely many post-rationalisms based on what context gets added back in first.
San Fransisco rationalism can be formally equal to London rationalism or Delhi rationalism. But SF post-rat will not be equal to London post-rat or Delhi post-rat.
I've broken it up geographically but you could also do it by main interest e.g. meditation or by political tradition. I don't feel I should have to say why referring to TPOT is going to feel groundless in this situation.
So maybe looking for something labelled post-rationalism is less exciting than seeing post-rationalism in action in the world, as a real contextual thing.
This reminds me of your anti-philosophy thread. I agree with what you say about it but I'm not about to start a post-philosophy group. I'll just use my time better
Thank you! This expresses insights I hadn't had; and is beautifully written.
Yes, more of these, for sure!
Half baked is good
Half baked is better than never baked.
Thank you! Good point.
Upvote for more short half-baked pieces. I liked this one 😄
Re: the question of whether more short fun scrappy vs considered longform: personally I value considered longform and think it's objectively better, but in actual practice I tend to park it for when I have more time, meaning I never get round to it. I am way more likely to read short scrappy stuff from an email or when I'm looking for a short nibble of distraction on my phone. So you have to weigh up whether you value something existing in finished form for posterity or being read and talked about in the present
This is helpful, thank you! Although your equivocation also matches mine :)
Tentatively, I’m planning to shift the mixture somewhat. That implies more short, fun pieces, partly to get something across, and partly as bait to hook readers into doing the work of tackling the long difficult ones.
i enjoy a short piece like this, and also i for one think reports of tpot's death are greatly exaggerated!
I'd say that LW-adjacent subculture itself seems to be as much your cult as it is Yudkowsky's these days. Meditation, focusing, circling are about as prominent as getting worked up about bayesianism, interpretations of quantum mechanics or killer robots. Whether this has gotten them any closer to addressing fundamental problems of postmodernity remains to be seen...
I thought tpot and postrationalists were the same thing. Looking over their shoulder I admired their openness and the way they don't talk in the usual poisonous STEM way (ie only in one-upping/disagreements), but also they clearly have the same problems as the rationalists or other Berkeley people (tend to join cults, develop mental illnesses, friends all keep trying to convince you of scientific racism, etc).
Speaking of cults, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the recent Zizian debacle, which was basically a product of taking the tenets and practices of Rationalism way, way, too seriously (along with normal cult dynamics).
I'd like to think that if only these people had absorbed more metarationality a lot of tragedy could have been averted.
Ref if you don't know what I'm talking about https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death The conclusion of that piece:
"Just based on its name and its most prominent interests, it’s easy to imagine the Rationalist Movement as a kind of empirically grounded alliance of engineers promoting the scientific method. And there are certainly groups underneath the big Rationalist umbrella for whom that is a fair description. But when you poke around a little bit--when you read about how “Rationalism” plays out in its communities in practice--the “movement” starts to feel a little less STEM and a lot more New Age: A suspect program for self-improvement, with existential stakes, a strong emphasis on self-experimentation, and a deleterious commitment to openness. In this sense its predecessors are not really the original enlightenment rationalists, but the dubious touchstones of ‘60s-hangover California--Scientology and Dianetics, Werner Erhard and est, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Manson Family."
Thanks, yes, I've had the Zizis in my feed quite a lot recently!
I'm not sure how much blame to attribute to LW rationalism in this particular case. Probably not much? Ziz & co are extreme outliers, and if they hadn't parasitized LW rationalism they might have done the same in Scientology or whatever.
That said, LW rationalism does repeatedly spawn malignant cults. None of the others as dramatically bad, but several that have seriously messed up quite a few people. It's well past coincidence at this point. Plus the rate of social dysfunction, flagrantly bad behavior, and serious mental health crises within the mainstream LW subculture is well above the norm.
A number of my friends are "in the helping professions" and have repeatedly worked to put back together the traumatized.
I sometimes get urgent phone calls like "Have you heard about [LW-spinoff group #27]? What can you tell me about them?" And I say "Oh dear, another rationalist blowup? I hope no one is hospitalized this time" and they say "You know that as a matter of professional ethics I can't comment, but what's scoop on [LW-spinoff group #27]?" Usually I know little, since I'm at least two hops removed from LW, but can confirm that yes it's another dubious LW spinoff group.
There's a number of plausible reasons to excuse LW from this. I mean, there was some similar stuff at MIT when we were students there decades ago! Maybe LW does not run above the base rate for associations of highly open STEM people.
I'm a longtime MOP of LW and I suspect "LW does not run above the base rate for associations of highly open STEM people" is true. The 'apocalyptic flavor' of LW probably doesn't help tho.
Given that reason, however wonderful it may be, is obviously only a part of human experience, even reason would have to concede that a philosophy centered only on reason would eventually fall apart or reach its limits.
By the naming conventions of English, the philosophy (or whatever you'd rather call it...) that emerges after the failure of X, without totally abandoning X is called "post-X".
Postrationalism is a linguistic inevitability.
Was gonna chicken out of commenting until I noticed the Sunless Sea reference and couldn't pass on an opportunity to evangelize Alexis Kennedy's more recent work on Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours: https://weatherfactory.biz/
But the comment I was chickening out of was getting distracted by the reference to the old geeks and MOPs post and wondering if you still stand by the subcultures-are-dead premise; I wrote a thing disagreeing with it a little while back that ended up being some foundational framing for how I think of entertainment culture nowadays: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/all-the-subcultures-are-undead
> evangelize Alexis Kennedy's more recent work
Thank you!
Thanks also for the link to your subcultures post, which I liked.
"Geeks MOPs and sociopaths" is itself somewhat undead. It was supposed to be one small piece of an extended explanation of subcultures, which is still in draft form. Maybe someday I'll finish it; maybe not!
I used the word "subculture" in a somewhat specific way, which has caused confusion. In this sense (common in academic sociology), a subculture is a total lifestyle package. Those are now rare outside closed cults.
Since those sorts of subcultures are now nearly non-existent, the word now refers to different sorts of groups that I'd call "fandoms," "hobby communities," or "scenes" instead. The distinction is important, I think, but drawing that out would/will take a substantial essay.
In the mean time, this post sorta explains why there aren't subcultures anymore: https://meaningness.com/atomized-mode
Ah! That makes sense, I'm almost entirely familiar with "subcultures" in the latter sense, and I suppose it's easy to confuse inasmuch as the former can also be thought of the latter. I like "neotribal" as an alternate description of the former, or maybe the latter?
Hmm, one of those.
I'm tempted to argue that there -is- a dominant "normie" subculture but it's definitely distinct from what would have been the dominant social culture as you describe in, say, the 60s. Good food for thought.
I continue to think you're too dismissive (or something along these lines) of 'LessWrong rationality'.
Aside from adopting the words/name 'rationality' and 'rationalism', it's not an intellectually naïve continuation of historical Rationalism – the original posts explicitly warn against making that mistake for one.
But I also consider you to be, intellectually (and even 'intellectual-aesthetically') a member of The Greater Rationality Sphere. All of your posts would be welcome on LessWrong and I think basically all of your ideas have been incorporated into 'LessWrong rationality' already.
One reason why I suspect LessWrong (reasonably) comes across as amateurish or naïve is that it was started by Eliezer to walk others thru not just his reasoning about the dangers of AI, but more so to walk them through what he considered all of the background material necessary to have sufficient context to follow his reasoning about AI and why it's dangerous. Presenting existing ideas to new audiences is laudable! And I think Eliezer was remarkably successful at doing so.
Another reason why I'm confused you're not more 'sympathetic' is that it seems EXTREMELY useful to guide people to a version of Rationality, even if it _didn't_ incorporate a lot of your insights about metarationality. I haven't found much, if any, valuable insights in the works of the 'postrationalists' because many, if not most, of them never seem to have reached 'rationality' – stage 4 in your adult development stage theory – in the first place. IME, they're LARPING as 'postrationalists' as part of a firmly 'communal' (stage 3) complex of behaviors, i.e. 'postrationalism is cool'.
(It also definitely seems to me that most 'Rationalists' are at stage 3 of development too – that's possibly/probably inevitable for any 'movement' of more than a few dozen people.)
Yeah, I don't disagree with any of this.
I think you are right that many/most LW Rationalists and postrationalists act in stage 3 ways in their relationships. On the other hand, many/most think at stage 4 (or beyond) about STEM-ish stuff. This "lag" between the domains is very common for STEM-educated people.
From your post "Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence" (on Vividness):
> Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.
I think that's a big part of why LessWrong has been valuable, to me and many others. It's mostly about that exact transition – because that was then and is now probably the biggest bottleneck for promoting enough people to the necessary level to tackle the biggest and thorniest problems.
Yes, I think that’s right, and I agree it is valuable. I wish lots of things about the Rationalist subculture were different, but it may be the best-fit alternative available for some people. A decent university STEM education is probably better for far more; but that doesn’t work for everyone.
Your existence has been a curiosity for me for a while now and recently I've started warming up to the idea of reading your book sometime.
At least you're pursuing your own project. Who's doing that these days?
An interesting coincidence—my existence has been a curiosity for me for a while now also!
So, we are headed for platonic fractal worship?
Forgot to answer yr question. I like the half baked stuff, probably says something bad about me.
Thank you!