Why aren’t “rationalists” surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren’t they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most “rationalists” just seem like ordinary people, perhaps of moderately above-average intelligence, with one more hobbyhorse to ride?
Because they don’t win? Because they don’t reliably steer reality into narrow regions other people consider desirable?
I’ve met and worked with several irrationalists whose models of reality were, to put it mildly, not correlated to said reailty, with one explicit, outspoken anti-rationalist with a totally weird, alien epistemology among them. All these people had a couple of interesting things in common.
On one hand, they were often dismal at planning – they were unable to see obvious things, and they couldn’t be convinced otherwise by any arguments appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ (they universally hated these words).
On the other hand, they were surprisingly good at execution. All of them were very energetic people who didn’t fear any work or situation at all, and I almost never saw any of them procrastinating. Could this be because their minds, due to their poor predictive ability, were unable to see the real difficulty of their tasks and thus avoided auto-switching into procrastination mode?
(And a third observation – all these people excelled in political environments. They tended to interpret their surroundings primarily in terms of who is kin to whom, who is a friend of who, who is sexually attracted to whom, what others think of me, who is the most influential dude around here etc etc. What they lost due to their desynchronization with factual reality, they gained back thanks to their political aptness. Do rationalists excel in political environments?)
Smartphones.
If you told someone in 1980 that just three decades later they will have a portable phone, a video phone, a worldwide electronic teletype, a movie player with a 300dpi screen, a color photo and video camera with a flash, a satellite world map, a music player that holds over a hundred LP albums, dictionaries and translation tools for all Earth languages, train and flight schedules updated in real time, a library of books (one of which an illustrated encyclopaedia that exceeds Britannica in volume and, in some areas, in accuracy), plus thousands of free porn channels and video games, all crammed into a single wireless device that fits in your pocket and costs less than $300 -- would they believe you?
I’m no expert on science fiction, but as far as I can tell, the vast majority of sci-fi authors missed this idea—perhaps because it’s too ridiculous to be believable.
Added: What’s even more ridiculous for a layman from 30 years ago is that all this amazing stuff is implemented on the basis of a computer, basically a machine that adds or subtracts binary numbers and stores the results in memory. “Eh? A music player that works by adding binary numbers? Are you okay?”