Rationality

The rationalist and EA scenes: LessWrong, Bayesianism, effective altruism, their methods and critiques

A topic in the tpot Community Archive, drawn from 8,114 posts.

Trusted voices in Rationality

Ordered by the trust Rationality's own network concentrates on each poster, most first.

  1. QiaochuYuan — trusted by 155 posters here
  2. nosilverv — trusted by 152 posters here
  3. eigenrobot — trusted by 129 posters here
  4. myhandle — trusted by 121 posters here
  5. TylerAlterman — trusted by 132 posters here
  6. visakanv — trusted by 115 posters here
  7. eshear — trusted by 106 posters here
  8. goblinodds — trusted by 90 posters here
  9. algekalipso — trusted by 86 posters here
  10. PrinceVogel — trusted by 84 posters here
  11. michaelcurzi — trusted by 79 posters here
  12. NathanpmYoung — trusted by 75 posters here

Top posts in Rationality

Ordered by the recorded like count from the source corpus; a like is not an endorsement.

  1. [slams hand down on table] rationality is an attempt to reconstruct judaism but using exclusively the mind instead of the heart, and effective altruism is the same thing but for christianity.… (QiaochuYuan) — 45 likes
  2. Many kids become hyperrational as kids because that's the game adults are ostensibly playing. They get no purchase, ofc, because adults are just cosplaying being rational so that they don't get… (nosilverv) — 43 likes
  3. people don't appreciate that Eliezer founded an intellectual community where the highest status thing one can do is to publicly prove Eliezer wrong do you realize the magnitude of sheer fucking… (myhandle) — 36 likes
  4. people asking why @slatestarcodex fell off have it completely backwards. in 2014 he wrote what no one else was writing, it blew people's minds, and everyone started thinking like him and writing… (myhandle) — 34 likes
  5. 2012: I'm a rationalist! 2014: rationalist is old hat, I'm gray tribe 2016: oh no, "gray tribe" was co-opted by Thiel bros, guess I'm just a rationalist again 2018: I'm a post rat! 2020: oh no,… (myhandle) — 33 likes
  6. Such a blackpill to learn that most people regarded as "really smart" are actually doing a complicated logic game of moving around abstractions that don't actually map onto the physical/social… (TylerAlterman) — 32 likes
  7. Took me long enough but there's only two things I've always been trying to say. (2) is a subset of (1), really, but I don't yet know how to say precisely how. https://t.co/6RDD6jR042 (nosilverv) — 30 likes
  8. sorry I took so long to reply to your email. I was waiting to be reenchanted with reality first (RichDecibels) — 29 likes
  9. a bunch of people grew up with no religion, went hyper-rationalist, left that behind, then started romanticizing religions as the New Truth,, but I'm now noticing that they never got the antibodies… (the_wilderless) — 29 likes
  10. I am not at all the sort of person inclined to be charitable to effective altruism. I am a romanticist, a Nietzschean, a skeptic of scientific materialism, liberal ideas of progress, etc. But in the… (PrinceVogel) — 28 likes
  11. when i started on twitter i was just starting to recover from being in a cult in a bigger cult, the rationality community i'd devoted 7 years of my life to no longer felt like home, the love of my… (QiaochuYuan) — 27 likes
  12. Manifold is down right now under the load. Bc apparently a lot of other ppl like me now have the first instinct “oh, news came out, better check the prediction markets to see what it implies for the… (eshear) — 27 likes
  13. the esoteric meaning of "postrationalist" is a person who is recovering from the totalizing memes in the rationalist ecosystem. it is a trip. especially because you can't just refute them by saying… (QiaochuYuan) — 26 likes
  14. Finally posted a critique of effective altruism that took me 6 months to write, “Effective altruism in the garden of ends”: https://t.co/Ot52uIqZpb (TylerAlterman) — 26 likes
  15. my time among the rationalists and my experiences with circling had convinced me that unbelievably agonizing amounts of emotional pain were underneath a lot of the other stuff that people seemed to… (QiaochuYuan) — 26 likes
  16. a lot of the people i respect the most know what it's like to feel betrayed by an ideology, and what it's like to deconvert. it's humbling to know you can be full of conviction for years and then… (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  17. a fun fact about the rationality and effective altruism communities is that they attract a lot of ex-evangelicals. they have this whole thing about losing their faith but still retaining all of the… (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  18. epistemic status: im just speculating bro potentially one reason the rationalist diaspora somewhat disrespects academia in some ways is that imo rationalism cultivated legitimately better norms… (eigenrobot) — 25 likes
  19. extremely common smart young person failure mode: 1. notice the conventional rationale for some thing is bullshit 2. conclude that therefore the thing is bad actually 3. make opposition to the thing… (eigenrobot) — 25 likes
  20. 1) harry potter and the methods of rationality 2) acid https://t.co/5fKjxedQ8q (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  21. deliberation was the 1st time my ideas had been tested by good faith disagreement, sustained debate, other people with different experiences & different beliefs, who were willing to stay with… (RichDecibels) — 25 likes
  22. finally learnt about kegan stages 😊 now I have a whole new suite of tools to attack my enemies and patronise my friends behind their backs (metaLulie) — 25 likes
  23. it's significant about eliezer yudkowsky's core sequences material that most of it is elaborate arguments for weird positions but the one time he switches to "this is obvious to a child and requires… (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  24. it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of… (QiaochuYuan) — 24 likes
  25. god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that's always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. *i have been living inside a… (QiaochuYuan) — 24 likes
  26. (me about to drag an unsuspecting rationalist to church) you might say its strong beliefs, held weekly (eigenrobot) — 24 likes
  27. LessWrong deserves more credit for its role in the online intellectual scene we inherited -- especially the kind, good-faith, nerdy essay style. LessWrong is an intellectual ancestor -- like… (__drewface) — 23 likes
  28. Just realized Lesswrong’s rationality is first of all an aesthetic and that it attracts people aesthetically 😐😐😐 (nosilverv) — 23 likes
  29. one of the worst things rationality did to me (or, you could say, i did to myself using rationality, idk) was teach me to use the part of my mind i had developed to do homework to run my entire life (QiaochuYuan) — 22 likes
  30. TPOT is now the de facto content source for the rats lmao, they h8 us cause they 8 us https://t.co/Po8jrjnEiQ (nosilverv) — 22 likes
  31. are you now, or have you ever been, a member of effective altruism (eigenrobot) — 22 likes
  32. get it??? the rationality community was selected from the beginning for being a community of people unusually susceptible to being convinced of things by eliezer fucking yudkowsky. that's the joke.… (QiaochuYuan) — 22 likes
  33. it feels unbelievably crass to bring this up and ask people to connect the dots here between this and, y'know, the cryonics, and all the other fucking raving lunacy that came out of the sequences,… (QiaochuYuan) — 22 likes
  34. i am not the person to write about this in more detail but in the worldview of the sequences there is no such thing as making peace with death in a real way. in retrospect this speaks to a profound… (QiaochuYuan) — 22 likes
  35. there's this big rationalist norm where you're supposed to take the "outside view" a lot and kinda average your opinion with other people's opinions and i think it sucks actually. you're reneging on… (QiaochuYuan) — 22 likes
  36. Ngl after the 2020 riots & Covid insanity I got on this website kind of open minded to right wing ideas, but after some time I just had to accept how stupid these morons are. Turns out great… (michaelcurzi) — 22 likes
  37. “An intellectual history of postrats” What would you include and investigate? inb4 lesswrong, ea, ribbonfarm, meaningness, ssc, {focusing, ifs, ipf, core transformation} (exgenesis) — 22 likes
  38. The hippie world & the science world can be reconciled, here's how to do it: 1. Take a break from arguing over mechanism/metaphysical assumptions (HIPPIE: It works because of mystical energy!… (TylerAlterman) — 21 likes
  39. Basically I think the path ahead is still rationality & effective altruism but from a place of playfulness & romance rather than from a place of martyrdom & stiffness (TylerAlterman) — 21 likes
  40. the rationalist and EA ecosystems select massively for recruiting people (~nerds with poor social skills) who are confused in specific highly correlated ways about e.g. feelings, the body, etc., and… (QiaochuYuan) — 20 likes
  41. i wonder whether i should just love and embrace who i am (rationalist) even tho it means tweeting incredibly annoying replies like "how would that work" or "how would you test this hypothesis" or… (mechanical_monk) — 20 likes
  42. I barely see any Effective Altruists talking about solving one of the most fundamental problems, the biggest bottleneck to societal progress — fear We have powerful psychotechnologies that can help… (nowtheo) — 20 likes
  43. "but wait, isn't yud the AI guy? what's all this stuff about cognitive biases?" the reason this whole fucking thing exists is that yud tried to talk to people about AI and they disagreed with him… (QiaochuYuan) — 20 likes
  44. yud wrote harry potter and the methods of rationality on purpose as a recruitment tool. he is explicit about this, and it worked. many very smart people very good at math were attracted into his… (QiaochuYuan) — 20 likes
  45. Yudkowsky is a titan. Sneercels can’t handle it. He’s more intellectually productive than 98% of you fake fucks and done more good than 99.995% of you and he spends 178.981% of his time watching anime (michaelcurzi) — 20 likes
  46. You don't have to choose a side. You can inherit the most brilliant parts of rationalist thought, recognize the stakes, appreciate the beauty of AI, build, and have fun all at once. Carve your own… (repligate) — 20 likes
  47. sneers act like LessWrong is about indoctrinating people into Eliezer's AI doomerism but the highest karma posts year in year out for 15 FUCKING YEARS now are people like Robin Hanson, Richard Ngo,… (myhandle) — 20 likes
  48. the rationalists used "techniquifying" to refer to trying to turn people's weird little self-improvement things they did into repeatable techniques that could be taught to other people and i've… (QiaochuYuan) — 20 likes
  49. when I grow up I want to be a rational actor with perfect information (xsphi) — 20 likes
  50. common rationalist fallacy: someone being able to explain why they're right is the best indicator that they're right (yoltartar) — 20 likes

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