English teacher for adults and teacher trainer, a lover of many things (math, truth, literature(s), art, physics, history, languages) and people.
manueldelrio
Karma: 1
Hello there! My name is Manuel and I am a TEFL teacher from Spain. I discovered Rationalism and the Rationality community a few years ago (late 2022) and found myself sharing a lot of what seem to be its core principles, i.e., I think I am quite enthusiastic about all of these, from the User’s Guide:
values curiosity, learning, self-improvement, figuring out what’s actually true (rather than just what you want to be true or just winning arguments)
will change their mind or admit they’re wrong in response to compelling evidence or argument
wants to work collaboratively with others to figure out what’s true
likes acknowledging and quantifying uncertainty and applying lessons from probability, statistics, and decision theory to your reasoning
is nerdy and interested in all questions of how the world works and who is not afraid to reach weird conclusions if the arguments seem valid
likes to be pedantic and precise, and likes to bet on their beliefs
doesn’t mind reading a lot
Very briefly, let me add a couple of things more: 1) Some specific information about me that might be useful/relevant, and 2) what Rationalist texts/materials I’ve been reading and pondering about.
Me
If I had to define one goal that I find really valuable and personally meaningful, I’d say it is ruthless truth-seeking, which is what probably has attracted me the most towards Rationalism. I have a really intense desire fo discovering the true and for trying to avoid self-deceptions.
My educational background is strongly in the Humanities (which likely accounts for some of my biases, interests and a prioris on how I look at things, including a deep skepticism of language and truth claims, a liking for truths as ends in themselves and a distaste for the practical and pragmatic). In the last decade I rediscovered a fascination and love for math and am trying to self-teach myself an undergraduate curriculum of it.
Intellectual engagement with Rationalism
Besides some cross-posted post in the EA forum, I’d say the first full-length Rationalist text I read was Eliezer Yudkowsky’s HPMOR, which I found interesting, but also not in what I’d feel as an optimal setting (I haven’t read any Harry Potter books or have a keen interest on it, and I had never read a long fandom text before, although since then I have read some ‘rationalist fiction’ with enjoyment, like Scott Alexander’s Unsong, Alexander Wales’s Worth the Candle or Nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves).
One book I found very illuminating about the community, its goals and thoughts, was Tom Chivers’ The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy (he also had a very good popular introduction to Bayes’s Theorem I found useful) and Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. Other, more periferally adjacent material I’ve also read includes Joseph Henrich, introductions to Game Theory, The Strategy of Conflict and some economics, biology and psychology stuff (Makiw, Haidt, Dawkins, Seth, Geoffrey Miller). On AI and its risks, Christian’s The Alignment Problem, Ord’s The Precipice and Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn. Yudkowsky’s and Nate’s new book should be arriving today in the mail. I would like to start reading The Sequences but am a bit loath to do it here, as I feel I can only seriously concentrate when reading in print, so will be trying to get a paperback copy of Rationality: From AI to Zombies (if difficult to get, I’ll resign myself to using my e-reader). Beyond books, I’ve been listening to the podcasts from Rationally Speaking -am more than halfway through them by now- and some short videos online (Rational Animations, some podcasts with Yudkowsky and the CFAR and Singularity Institute videos in which Anna Salamon appears. I have to stress how enlightening I’ve found the latter).
I think that is all for the moment! Hope to see and read you around.
This was a nice and relatively short post as well. I started reading it from what I assume is an anti-realist position (ethics as something constructed, a framework of agreements between rational agents to enable cooperation and mutual benefit, and therefore something mostly procedural and contractual. Probably aligned with Hobbes and Gauthier, once I find the time to read them). I was unsurprised that, having chosen your 5 as the most similar to my views, you described it as ‘moral anti-realist’. I have the impression that EAs and perhaps a lot of Rationalists seem to resonate a lot with Utilitarianism. I appreciate any suggestions of older posts to read in this regard (I am new to all this).