rationalist community
Article
rationalist community is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 04, 2022 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The rationalist community has been trying this for fifteen years”; “you’re just describing the rationalist community”. It most often appears alongside 3Blue1Brown, Aella, AGI.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: January 04, 2022
- Last seen: May 30, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 3Blue1Brown (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- Alasdair MacIntyre (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- ancient aliens (1 shared issues)
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- Apollonian (1 shared issues)
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- Asian Scientist (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes baby book (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes to babies (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.
What do you do? I guess you do the principled philosophy thing. You collide the two narratives, integrate them, and try to build something useful out of the debris, while constantly being tripped up by fuzzy boundaries and edge cases. The rationalist community has been trying this for fifteen years, and so far what we’ve got is some combination of “these math lectures describe what to do perfectly in theory, shame we disagree on how to apply them to the real world” and “prediction markets seem maybe good” and “turns out the people who obsess over this are often trustworthy on object-level questions” . Other people have been chipping away at the same question for longer and developed Arts of their own, but no one seems fully satisfied.
There’s a lot wrong about that summary1, but it’s at least a place to begin. The “new tools” are the ones created in the last couple thousand years, like careful concepts, finicky definitions, the scientific method, analysis & synthesis, and the quantification of everything. We here in the rationalist community love these things. Inculcating students in them is what much of the academic curriculum was built to do.
Inline links: 1
This, I think, is actually the deepest value of teaching kids Bayes: it’s a way to get them to converse with people whose views they think are stupid. And it’s only through actually doing that that we have any chance of helping people become rational. Such conversations (done with checking each other’s math) are the way to inculcate an openness to being wrong, a detached self-worth, comfort with uncertainty, and all the other aspects of what Julia Galef has so winsomely dubbed scout mindset. Approached this way, Bayes isn’t the weirdo, quant-y capstone to scout mindset — it’s the publicly-accessible front door. 6: Where are we, now? I.I.: You claim to be promoting something new, but it seems to me like you’re just describing the rationalist community. Indeed I am! My claim wasn’t that this method of explaining Bayes goes beyond what’s practiced in the community — just that it’s likely to do a better job pulling kids into the sorts of intense, curiosity-fueled relationships that our community excels at.