How does rationalism affect one’s values? If you really wanted me to be rationalist, what might cause the most friction in converting me?
A large confounding factor in observations of rats is that LW is modally libertarian tech-adjacent American. So it might be difficult to distinguish rat from libertech.
Do you think those clusters of traits are distinguishable from each other? Or is libertarianism (for example) a rationalist value?
How would the values and behaviour of a 35yo Brazilian schoolteacher, compared to a 22yo English CS major, change, if they both started reading the sequences and found them compelling?
What I’m pointing at:
Take a group of people with similar demographics, they’ll already share a chunk of values to start with. If you hang out with bunch of people long enough, you’ll converge on similar beliefs, because by sharing sources of information, you’ll have pretty similar perspectives on the world.
You think (?) that the movement prescribes a narrow set of values.
It does prescribe being effective (instrumental rationality), for which having accurate beliefs (epistemic rationality) is useful. The convergence of beliefs and perspectives is just what happens when any number of people associate closely.
The crux being: my “rationalist” draws a circle around epistemic and instrumental rationality, whereas your “rationalist” also includes a larger chunk of the common values and beliefs of rationalist people.
This is just accurate and I have nothing interesting to add to it. I basically think that considering the thing in the abstract as an idea as opposed to the thing in the real world as a social grouping, scene, place, group of people, set of practices, etc is kind of wasted. As soon as you make a point of not just taking some part of the ideas seriously but identifying yourself as a rationalist and participating in any rationalist space (including this one) the thing you are doing is not, primarily, an abstraction that lives entirely in your head.
Should we look for a crux? I think I’ve got one.
How does rationalism affect one’s values? If you really wanted me to be rationalist, what might cause the most friction in converting me?
A large confounding factor in observations of rats is that LW is modally libertarian tech-adjacent American. So it might be difficult to distinguish rat from libertech.
Do you think those clusters of traits are distinguishable from each other? Or is libertarianism (for example) a rationalist value?
How would the values and behaviour of a 35yo Brazilian schoolteacher, compared to a 22yo English CS major, change, if they both started reading the sequences and found them compelling?
What I’m pointing at:
Take a group of people with similar demographics, they’ll already share a chunk of values to start with. If you hang out with bunch of people long enough, you’ll converge on similar beliefs, because by sharing sources of information, you’ll have pretty similar perspectives on the world.
You think (?) that the movement prescribes a narrow set of values.
It does prescribe being effective (instrumental rationality), for which having accurate beliefs (epistemic rationality) is useful. The convergence of beliefs and perspectives is just what happens when any number of people associate closely.
The crux being: my “rationalist” draws a circle around epistemic and instrumental rationality, whereas your “rationalist” also includes a larger chunk of the common values and beliefs of rationalist people.
This is just accurate and I have nothing interesting to add to it. I basically think that considering the thing in the abstract as an idea as opposed to the thing in the real world as a social grouping, scene, place, group of people, set of practices, etc is kind of wasted. As soon as you make a point of not just taking some part of the ideas seriously but identifying yourself as a rationalist and participating in any rationalist space (including this one) the thing you are doing is not, primarily, an abstraction that lives entirely in your head.