[marginalium]
Fun critique of rationalists
6 Feb 2025
Finally! Someone wrote this up. Several thousand words complaining about the obviously doomed rationality project, all couched in a story about Luigi Mangione to spice it up:
In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases … an earnest curiosity about how the world works coupled with a boundless faith in technology’s ability to reshape it, a treatment of social issues as engineering problems reducible to a utilitarian calculus, and a great deal of confidence in one’s own ability to apply this calculus as a “high decoupling” thinker unconstrained by political “tribalism.”
and:
The joke is that rationalist longtermists have produced countless articles, blog posts and podcasts; organized conferences and retreats; and spent billions promoting a supposedly radical new philosophy. The punchline is that the grand result of this project is simply our current system with extra steps
They’re talking about Marxism—rationalist thinking simply working to reify itself. But as I keep complaining about, it’s also just redescribing and suffering from all the inevitable errors in thought we already knew about.
Anthologies: Betterment, Gratification, Thought Architecture, On Culture, On Thinking and Reasoning, Everything Is Ideology, Noetik