Funny story: rationalists actually did exist, technically, before or around World War One. So, there is a Polish nobleman named Alfred Korzybski who, after seeing horrors of World War One, thought that as technology keeps improving, well, wisdom’s not improving, then the world will end and all humans will be eradicated, so we must focus on producing human rationality in order to prevent this existential catastrophe. This is a real person who really lived and he actually sat down for like 10 years to like figure out how to like solve all human rationality God bless his autistic soul. You know, he failed obviously but you know you can see that the idea is not new in this regard.
Korzybski’s two published books are Manhood of Humanity (1921) and Science and Sanity (1933).
E. P. Dutton published Korzybski’s first book, Manhood of Humanity, in 1921. In this work he proposed and explained in detail a new theory of humankind: mankind as a “time-binding” class of life (humans perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become accreted in cultures).
Having read the book (and having filtered it through some of my own interpretaion of it and perhaps some steelmanning) I am inclined to interpret his “time-binding” as something like (1) accumulation of knowledge from past experience across time windows that are inaccessible to any other animals (both individual (long childhoods) and cultural learning); and (2) the ability to predict and influence the future. This gets close in the neighborhood of “agency as time-travel”, consequentialist cognition, etc.
Korzybski intended the book to serve as a training manual. In 1948, Korzybski authorized publication of Selections from Science and Sanity after educators voiced concerns that at more than 800 pages, the full book was too bulky and expensive.
As Connor said...
God bless his autistic soul. You know, he failed obviously but
In his MLST podcast appearance in early 2023, Connor Leahy describes Alfred Korzybski as a sort of “rationalist before the rationalists”:
Korzybski’s two published books are Manhood of Humanity (1921) and Science and Sanity (1933).
Having read the book (and having filtered it through some of my own interpretaion of it and perhaps some steelmanning) I am inclined to interpret his “time-binding” as something like (1) accumulation of knowledge from past experience across time windows that are inaccessible to any other animals (both individual (long childhoods) and cultural learning); and (2) the ability to predict and influence the future. This gets close in the neighborhood of “agency as time-travel”, consequentialist cognition, etc.
In the wiki page of his other book:
(But that is relatively well-known.)
As Connor said...
...but 60 years later, his project would be restarted.
See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences
I’ve written about this here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kFRn77GkKdFvccAFf/100-years-of-existential-risk