Rationalism

So I’ve been reading Astral Codex Ten for a little while. I think that sentence comes with a little bit of baggage, but I also think the people that would want to beat me with that baggage probably don’t read my blog, and the people that do read my blog (all 2 of them, where 1 of them is me) probably don’t care who Scott Alexander is.

Anyway.

Alexander got his start on the “rationalist web,” which I think means on the website LessWrong.com or whatever it was that came before LessWrong.com. Or maybe in parallel.

So being a reader Astral Codex Ten I decided to give the LessWrong community a go. But lo I find that everyone over there sort of oozes this online-ish sagacity and couches esoteric opinions in interpreted evidence and says things like,

But if you imagine a billion worlds—Everett branches, or Tegmark duplicates—this thought process will not systematically correlate optimists to branches in which no nuclear war occurs.

Which, what? This is from the very first document in the set of foundational texts in the Online Rationalist canon.

I get that their whole shtick is that they’re trying to, like, uncover Truth or something, but all of this feels so alienated from the real problems and questions of life that I can’t help but feel like the “rationalist community” is just a bunch of men cosplaying at the Business of Living rather than actually participating in it.