rationalist
Article
rationalist is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 29, 2021 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making”; “Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston”; “Chesterton’s Fence” is a Rationalist shorthand”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, England, Scott.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: July 14, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Harvard (3 shared issues)
-
- England (2 shared issues)
-
- Scott (2 shared issues)
-
- !Kung San (1 shared issues)
-
- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
-
- aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
-
- ADHD (1 shared issues)
-
- Aeschylus (1 shared issues)
-
- Against Education (1 shared issues)
-
- age of dinosaurs (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."
Inline links: Why I Am Not A Technocrat
The effective altruism movement, which largely grew directly out of the rationalist movement, seeks to maximize the efficacy with which charitable donations are directed using standard rationalist methods. It is a tight-knit community that strongly privileges rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making (such as from the humanities, continental philosophy, or humanistic social sciences) and tends to dismiss input not formulated in rationalist terms. The community also has a strong and explicitly stated view that its activities uniquely contribute to the achievement of “the good”: of their top five recommendations of most productive careers by a leading community organization, two suggest being a researcher or support staff within the movement, and two others recommend working on the AI alignment problem (see the next point). Until recently, much of the analysis and funding emerging from the community has pointed towards a focus on extremely unlikely but potentially catastrophic risks, such as alien, asteroid or biological catastrophes.
Weyl wrote this essay a few months before COVID, so his pooh-poohing of the idea that there might be a biological catastrophe is an unfortunate anachronism. But I think it's important to note that we got this right (and he got it wrong) precisely because we "privilege rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making". People like Toby Ord tried to calculate the risk of every kind of disaster and how bad it would be - and at the same time Weyl was making fun of us for caring about biological catastrophes, Ord was writing about how the numbers suggested zoonotic diseases from bats could cause catastrophic pandemics. This kind of work ultimately led to EA flagship group Open Philanthropy Project spending almost $50 million on its Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program between 2014 and 2019; if other people had taken a few minutes to read our arguments instead of chiding us for how naive it is to prioritize things based on rational methods, maybe the world would have been more prepared.
Inline links: like Toby Ord, Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program
Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston right now as a promising place to community-build. They’re especially trying to expand the student groups at Harvard and MIT. If you live in Boston and/or attend either of those colleges, then - whether or not you can make it Sunday - consider giving them your name through this form so they can help get you connected.
Inline links: this form
Worse, Plato’s was a spiritual project: we were supposed to find the truth, and the truth was supposed to set us free. But many of the truths we’ve found seem less than edifying? Egan quotes the physicist Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”. This has sent some intellectuals to nihilism — or, worse still, to a snarky, clove-smoking postmodernism. Q: You do know this is a book review contest for a Rationalist blog, right? We’re not exactly despairing about the end of the Enlightenment here. (Read. The. Room.) I promised self-understanding for the capital-R-Rationalist community back at the beginning, and here it is.
I promised self-understanding for the capital-R-Rationalist community back at the beginning, and here it is.
You might assume that the Rationalist community is squarely in Philosophic understanding — and I think that’s mostly right. Just looking at Eliezer's “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”, I’m seeing argument, empiricism, simplicity, precision, and scholarship — pitch-perfect expressions of what Egan means by “Philosophic” understanding.
Inline links: Twelve Virtues of Rationality