Astral Codex Ten

postrationalists

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postrationalists

Article

postrationalists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 20, 2024 and February 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “there’s a group called the “postrationalists” who were vaguely inspired by rationalist writings”; “Pope Eliezer LXXVII to evangelize to the postrationalists”. It most often appears alongside COVID, Elon Musk, 2024 presidential election.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 20, 2024
  • Last seen: February 20, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
My current understanding of what happened: there’s a group called the “postrationalists” who were vaguely inspired by rationalist writings but also think the emphasis on facts is boring and autistic and we need to focus more on creativity/friendship/woo/intuition/vibes. They have a gathering called VibeCamp where they do artsy stuff. Someone from Manifold went to a theater production by a postrat group called “The Classics Department”, liked them, and hired them to make a promotional event for Manifold. They are sort of rationalists and prediction market junkies, but also sort of making fun of rationalists and prediction market junkies. Hence this show.
Inline links: VibeCamp, “The Classics Department”
Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
February 20, 2025 · Original source
St. Michael Beisotsukai was sent by Pope Eliezer LXXVII to evangelize to the postrationalists. When he arrived at TPOT, they fell upon him, taunting “If you are so rational, then predict the way we are going to kill you”, for however he predicted, they planned to kill him through some other method. But St. Michael gave a probability distribution across all common methods of execution that also left substantial probability mass on unknown unknowns, and followed it up with an eloquent lecture on out-of-model error. The postrationalists were so impressed that they converted on the spot and didn’t kill him at all - but this was fine, because St. Michael’s distribution had included a 10% chance that this would happen, and later evidence from other missionaries demonstrated this to be well-calibrated.