Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Sunday at Dark Markets, I tackled a thorny angle of the #tescreal critique: What exactly is so bad about Rationalism? After all, didn't rationality and Enlightenment create great abundance? But Rationalism isn't really about improving rationality. 🧵 https://tinyurl.com/55nmthun
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Rationalism is both a specific cluster of organizations around Eliezer Yudkwosky's LessWrong, and a general tendency along the same lines. The core of that tendency is dismissing all modes of knowledge *other* than pure reason, such as tradition, emotion, and intuition.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
This is fundamentally wrongheaded from the start, for two reasons: 1) Intuition and emotion are powerful tools for improving human decision making. People who ignore intuition make bad decisions. 2) Godel's Incompleteness Theorem = there can be no total axiomatic system.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Rationalists consider reason potentially all-powerful - including (ignoring Godel) the power to predict the future. This futurity is in turn one of the pillars of EA, longtermism, and transhumanism. Rationalism in essence led Sam Bankman-Fried to steal #FTX customers' money.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
That's because Rationalism has a wrinkle: The implicit belief that *the Rationalists themselves* are the only reasonable people. Hence they deserve the bulk of funding to "study rationality." As reported last week, $5 million in stolen #FTX funds allegedly went to LessWrong.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Confidence about predicting the future translates into an apologetics of fascist violence. Nick Bostrom and Will MacAskill think impacts like "massacres" in the next "100 or (even 1,000) years" are "little more than tie-breakers" when judging outcomes. https://tinyurl.com/3d9tsfyb
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
As usual, these guys watched a sci-fi movie (Dune) and learned all the wrong lessons. As we must ask all too often these days, *What are they giving themselves permission for?*
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Even short of their Malthusian impulses, these people's thinking is dangerous because, counterintuively, *they don't believe in markets.* After all, if you can predict the future, you don't need the "wisdom of the crowd" to allocate resources. This is how SBF got blown up.
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