Public rationality
I’m going to list some moderately well-known people who strike me as unusually rational. They aren’t “rationalists” in the sense that they don’t generally explicitly talk about rationality.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi run a web site and talk radio show about car repair. They have a repetitious sense of humor, but if you look past that, you see that they have a very wide body of knowledge (and sometime, we should talk about how much detailed knowledge is worth acquiring so that you have something to be rational with), publicly display the process of testing hypotheses, and get in touch with people they’ve given advice to later to find out whether the advice worked. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.
Ta Nehisi Coates writes a politics and culture blog for The Atlantic. He’s notable for trying to see how everyone is doing what makes sense to them—rather a difficult thing when you’re taking on the mind-killer subjects.
Atul Gawande writes books and articles about the practice of medicine. It was particularly striking in his recent The Checklist Manifesto that when his checklists seemed to produce notable improvements in surgical outcomes, his first reaction was concern that there was something wrong with the experiment rather than delight that he’d been proven correct.
Any other recommendations?
Paul Graham is very well regarded for his essays and his work on setting up Hacker News and YCombinator, which he runs as scientific experiments.
Bruce Schneier seems pretty rational. I was recently reminded of this fact when he mentioned how his position on software monocultures has changed.
It’s refreshing when an expert says, “Whoops! I was wrong and here’s why.”
I recall being very surprised by the level of, if not rationality, then at least luminosity and bias-awareness in at least one book by the stage magician Derren Brown. He struck me as being at or above Dawkins’ level, with greater communication skills. He’d make an excellent fifth horseman if he chose.
Eric Lippert discusses mostly computer programming topics in a manner that demonstrates clear thinking. In particular, this post, (which references Car Talk) could have been a Less Wrong article.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams. His rationality comes across more in his blog than cartoons.
I’m pretty sure that first link is wrong?
The link is apparently correct (I found an article of theirs within 5 seconds), it’s just horribly badly organized (no subsection making for a better place to link to I could find).
I think http://www.cartalk.com/ would be a better link.
Thanks—link corrected.
But aren’t there any other people who engage in rationality in public?
This guy is literally a genius.
Reihan Salam also seems to be surprisingly rational (something I’d be very skeptical about from writers who purport as conservatives, although Razib Khan also calls himself conservative), although I haven’t read too much of his writing yet.
But if you’re a conservative who’s surrounded by liberals, then the circumstances often literally force you to be rational (because liberals will only respect your arguments if you’re rational). Conservatives may be less tolerant (on average) than liberals, but conservatives who have always been surrounded by liberals can be surprisingly tolerant.
Hey! We were internet-friends for a while. Matt is really awesome.
In my experience, people who have minority beliefs do tend to be more tolerant. They’re definitely more mature about disagreement because they’re more used to being disagreed with.
Wow, very interesting. :) Where did you meet Matt? I often liked his very creatively intelligent posts at the College Confidential forum.
I used to write an econ blog; we found each other through links and corresponded some.