every now and then i give LW a shot and every single time i end up slamming facefirst into a piece of Jargon explained over a five thousand words article that could have been a single sentence
The people involved all seem very… Full of themselves ? They don’t really ever show a sense of ‘hey, I’ve got a thought, maybe I haven’t considered all angles to it, maybe I’m wrong—but here it is’. The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say ‘I don’t know’ — contrarian1234
It’s getting increasingly easy to farm karma on LessWrong by making almost substantive-less posts that just articulate a position most people agree with.
the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else. For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. A well-known example is the effective altruism movement: it started with the premise that in charitable giving, you should maximize the amount of good per dollar spent. From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn — which somehow meant that working for a cryptocurrency / AI startup was the most ethical choice you could make. Or, as someone else put it: effective altruists concluded that the most charitable thing they could do is to buy themselves a castle (literally).
Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.
https://x.com/eris_nerung/status/2016317953264807947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317180 (much much more in the discussions)
https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/2021202750462362026
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dkrfGqJrGRx2HsLpe/rafael-harth-s-shortform?commentId=mXFZzaaj3Y4qixnAC
The rationalist community in general
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist