The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him, work through his reasoning, and update his blog with a note about it, but that didn't satisfy the author:
> Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes
> One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often.
This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone.
Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles.
This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.
I didn't read this and suddenly think "oh my god- the whole establishment is wrong! How thankful I am that some rational person has done the hard math for me to explain why ivermectin is a magic cure".
The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself.
As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
As far as I know Scott was the first person to suggest the "worm theory" (parasites) and no study has shown that to be the case. Unless some new body of Ivermectin research has come out that I'm unaware of, then you're misrepresenting current medical opinion by a long shot.
If it bothers you that Scott was the first person you saw raise that, you can ignore that part. However, I work at a biotech and regularly consult with scientists and doctors about COVID treatments, and several of them mentioned that possibility as being a potential explanation some time ago.
Is it really important for you to be "right" here? I am not attempting to misreprent medical opinion, just give an insight into their current thinking.
What point are you trying to make? That I'm misrepresenting the usage of Ivermectin by cherry picking facts? Wouldn't you be inclined to show I'm wrong then instead of just imply I'm misleading people?
Here you can find a long list of countries that use it nationwide as recommended at the national level (which is why I used countries to begin with) https://ivmstatus.com/
You're wrong; countries use medicine. There are national formularies which determine by and large what medicines are allowed to be used. This is not hard and fast, doctors are given wide latitude to prescribe medicine for off-label usage, but I think Sinovac and Sputnik V are both examples where "countries" use a medicine. There are many other examples outside of COVID.
If you looked at a global distribution (by country), of LSD users, per capita, I'm fairly certain that the US is going to be the top of that list (most users).
So, under that argument and my definitions, yes, America uses LSD.
I'm sorry I'm confused about what you are angry at.
I don't know the exact distributions of medicines around the world but that is a reference data, and I'm familiar with the general profiles of that reference data as well as the history of drug approvals globally.
It's pretty well understood by everybody in the medical field what it means for a country to use a medicine.
I do know what the term gerrymandering is and I ignored your comments about the electoral college (I don't know what they have to do with the current discussion).
I am not carrying anybody's water but my own. Oh, and i guess the parts of the global medical estasblishment that operate in good faith.
How can some people die on this hill? Like, seriously, the only positive effect it had was strangely enough in regions with significant worm infections. Significant positive effect is not hard to show, if there were any.
COVID has entered a post-rationalist phase of discussion. Nobody today is trying to convince another person using a rational unemotional analysis of the presented data. As we've seen more clearly in this crisis than ever before, people weaponize data and arguments and emotions to manipulate the beliefs of other people, and it takes an inordinate amount to debunk carefully constructed data lies.
I work on a set of principles that I don't particularly need to defend:
1) there is no global conspiracy with a large numbers of members working to create COVID and spread it around, or working to suppress legitimate medical approaches to treatment.
2) the people working in this field, by and large, are smart, but make mistakes, especially in the heat of the pandemic, but over time, as we collect more data across multiple lines of evidence, we'll come to a better understanding of what works well for COVID-infected patients. This took decades with HIV/AIDS and I expect it could take as long with COVID.
3) Armchair internet statisticians are not going to find some details in COVID studies demonstrating some sort of large-scale suppression of ivermectin results. Scientists are not going to run a study that gives unambiguous evidence that ivermectin is not a worthwhile treatment
4) there will continue to be some segment of the internet- a particular type of kook- who continue to insist that the error they found in subsection 9, clause c, is proof that ivermectin is actually a cheap and effective way to treat COVID. Just like we still have HIV/AIDS denialists.
It really did trip me up, in the first sentence mostly. Because that’s a commonplace counter argument on HN in general. Any thread with even mild controversy I expect to see multiple comments leading the way GP did.
Green accounts nowadays make me wary as well. At one point I put show dead on to help vouch for green accounts that started in shadowban mode, but now it feels like a 50% a new account was created very recently and used to fling shit on flamebait threads.
Around the middle though I picked up, at that point it was a little closer to caricature.
It’s more Spock-like than rationalist-culture-like. It’s clearly poor rhetoric and doesn’t jibe with anything I personally associate with the rationalist sphere. This really seems representative to you? If so I had no idea their image problem was so bad with so many HNers.
I'd admit the first sentence seemed straight out of any lesswrong post. The following are too condensed to be real, and i understood it was a joke, but i think i wouldn't be surprised to find this sprinkled in the middle of a long rambling in any SA comments.
In style and content it max-es out on the "I am very smart" scale. So-called rationalists will comb through comments they see as oppositional and accuse them as being emotional as a way to "win" the "argument". It's funny that in the thread about rationalism someone posted a comment that checks off all the boxes. It's really well done.
I've never been too familiar with the whole "rationalist" sphere or whatever but assuming what you're saying is true, does this mean that now, the mere act of pointing out the fact that someone is using emotionally-charged language or otherwise indicating an emotional appeal is being made, cannot be done without immediately triggering a "lol typical 'rationalist' take, such dispassion, very sophist, wow" type of response?
if so, that seems like a net loss for everyone.
these days I am always on the lookout for indications of the existence of heuristics that allow people to dismiss things out of hand using surface-level analysis, and I attempt to be as mindful about these things as possible, in order to most efficiently pursue Truth by attempting to let such things cloud my judgement as little as possible. hopefully this doesn't make me one of these apparently hated "rational" types...!
> hopefully this doesn't make me one of these apparently hated "rational" types...!
Maybe? I don't know. :)
It's fun exploring the art of discourse on HN. The moment I added pathos and pathos to the logos I was using, my online conversations got a lot better. It's fun playing around with 2600 year old tradition of rhetoric, trying rhetorical concepts out and seeing how people respond.
It's a fascinating community, in some regards. Scott is among the few people where I consciously notice that they are highly intelligent. He's also a decent writer and, despite my lingering fear, has not gone down the Glenn-Greenwald-pipeline into obnoxious contrarianism.
...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.
There was a lesswrong thread warning people about Leverage (a 100% literal Bay Area Scientology-like therapy cult, as opposed to the general LW community which is just a self-organized kind-of-a-sex-cult). I thought it was notable because it's written as if actually having an emotion or trying to look like it believed anything would be a deadly sin.
> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles.
Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now.
> Governments have been caught committing conspiracies in the past, so this means every single conspiracy theory today is true...even the ones that contradict each other.
Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody can prove themselves to be objective, or truly disprove Descartes' Great Deceiver), and am prone to confirmation bias (and others).
once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid.
Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.
Another thing which helps is to not just automatically have an opinion on everything, even if somewhat informed.
It's ok to say "I don't know, this is very complex, even if I spent many hours reading about this matter". Too many rationalists just go with the option which seems a bit more plausible and then behave as if they have near certainty.
So much this! But there is way too much emphasis on opinions, when frankly, unless someone is deeply invested in the given topic, it is likely worthless. And unfortunately, the less knowledgeable someone is, the more likely he/she has a very strong and vocal opinion on the topic.
I think I went down a somewhat similar route. It's easy to find oneself trying to embody some archetypal champion of "logical" and "rational" thinking when you're a highschool nerd.
In the end I think my issue that led me off it was that it just ended up being a) judgmental and b) like you, finding that I was just not right enough to justify it!
When I ran into more of those types (our types?) Who are a dime a dozen in a college engineering department my goto quip was:
The scientific method is the admission that rationality and logic are limited; they're just the first step — forming a hypothesis. The rest of it is about how your rationality and logic failed you.
I think this is partially why you find many rationalist and skeptic types not actually doing any science. They haven't had the humility beat into them by science yet, haha.
I was once attracted to it, and to EA, because of the surface-level values. It seemed like a community that wanted to acknowledge their own biases and work past them, yet in practice, it is a community that uses intellectualism as an aesthetic to confirm their preconceived biases. In its malignant form, you have LW and adjacent communities engaging in scientific racism revival. In the less malignant form, you have people working backwards and pretending that the conclusions they came to were "objective" because of the flowery Bayesian language they dressed their thought experiments in, as if they're constantly doing complex Bayesian inference in their heads. In the end, what was striking, to me, was the lack of humility you'd expect from those who agreed with the LW premise.
Similarly with EA, I liked the idea of optimizing charity for the most good, but in practice, the community seems to have no problem dedicating a ton of money, time and effort to MIRI and adjacent groups and people, because they've managed to use their intellectual aesthetics to spook themselves into believing that science fiction is reality. As a result, very real problems people experience today are discounted in favor of whatever scary future AI meme is spooking the community this month.
It's really kind of funny when you think about it, it's just a shame that they suck up so much oxygen in the room.
I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether:
1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'.
2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'.
3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken.
4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wouldn't be interested in modern science).
5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment.
This is an attractive pitch, so obviously, loads of people jump on. I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for. Every smart white kid from a nice background has been called 'logical' or 'rational' at some point, because (5), so it's a value they identify with. It's a young group, full of energy, because the internet is biased young, and young people go for (2) through (5).
Words and meanings change over time and depending on the context. Strangely you claim it's ignorance but then give supporting reasons why someone might label this "rationalism".
Rationalism is an important term in exactly the field they are supposed to be interested in. And they're using it in more or less the opposite of its conventional sense.
I guess it could be just really perverse usage, but I figure it's more like 'objectivism', or 'scientology', words that sound big and impressive to people who are either dumb, or just not very well informed.
You can't really change a term like rationalism, since it's really one of the biggest terms in philosophy, and philosophers are the kind of people who get upset when people use stuff like 'begging the question' wrong, which everybody does. So even if the 'rationalists' ended up having loads of great insights despite their inauspicious start, it would almost certainly never change the meaning of the word.
3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"
Also from: Williams B., Rationalism, [w:] D.M. Borchert (red.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, t. VIII, Thomson Gale, 2006, s. 239-247, ISBN 0-02-866072-2.
Rationalism in the enlightenment
The term rationalism is often loosely used to describe an
outlook allegedly characteristic of some eighteenth-
century thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly in
France, who held an optimistic view of the power of sci-
entific inquiry and of education to increase the happiness
of humankind and to provide the foundations of a free
but harmonious social order. In this connection “ratio-
nalistic” is often used as a term of criticism, to suggest a
naive or superficial view of human nature that overesti-
mates the influence of benevolence and of utilitarian cal-
culation and underestimates both the force of destructive
impulses in motivation and the importance of such non-
rational factors as tradition and faith in the human econ-
omy. Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and the Marquis de
Condorcet, among others, are often cited in this connec-
tion. Although there is some truth in these criticisms, the
naïveté of these and other Enlightenment writers has
often been grossly exaggerated. Also, insofar as “reason” is
contrasted with “feeling” or “sentiment,” it is somewhat
misleading to describe the Enlightenment writers as
rationalistic, for many of them (Denis Diderot, for exam-
ple) characteristically emphasized the role of sentiment.
Reason was praised in contrast with faith, traditional
authority, fanaticism, and superstition. It chiefly repre-
sented, therefore, an opposition to traditional Christian-
ity.
Here there are two contrasts with the seventeenth-
century rationalism of Descartes and others. First, this
rationalism is not characteristically antireligious or non-
religious; on the contrary, God in some sense, often in a
traditional sense, plays a large role in rationalist systems
(although Spinoza’s notion of God was extremely
unorthodox, and it is notable that the opposition of rea-
son and faith is important in his Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus). Second, the view of science held by such
Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire was different from
that of rationalism, being much more empiricist. The
central contrast embodied in the term rationalism as
applied to the earlier systems is that of reason versus
experience, a contrast that is certainly not present in the
Enlightenment praise of the “rational.”
I guess contemporary history of philosophy is kind of a modern product, so it makes sense that it might have been used in a different way back in the day. A lot of historical rationalists considered themselves empiricists, and vice versa. It's also not a term contemporary to like, Descartes (iirc).
I think the current meaning of rationalism (as opposed to empiricism) is vastly more useful than it as yet another 'good-ism', but you're probably right, words can change. It's still stupid that they didn't bother googling the term before calling themselves it.
I think the use of "rationalism" follows modern philosophy trends and isn't a reinvention. They are "actually" empiricists as opposed to rationalists, yes, but most of those rationalist ideas[0] moved to continental philosophy and are now part of the modern rationalists' enemies, humanities people who read French theory.
"Rationalism" descends from analytic philosophy/logical positivism/scientific method types, so they're into experiments now. This is good, because their main program of logical positivism doesn't actually work, so it's kind of a problem that they're still trying to do it.
[0] the world doesn't exist, there's only sense data causing you to imagine a shared world, thinking about things logically is better than trying them out
Wait, I'm getting confused between the two senses of 'rationalism' here. My guess is that contemporary 'rationalism' doesn't actually descend from any explicit philosophical tradition, just because if you read an introductory philosophy book, you'd not join a group with that name combined with their ethos.
I'm not that well versed in analytic philosophy - I think it's come a long way since the early days, so now straddles both sides of the rationalist/empiricist divide. At this point, I think it's basically a writing style. You get a lot of analytic philosophers with some pretty wild assertions about reality.
On the other side, somebody like Deleuze is basically a hardcore empiricist, but he's as 'continental' as they come.
> My guess is that contemporary 'rationalism' doesn't actually descend from any explicit philosophical tradition, just because if you read an introductory philosophy book, you'd not join a group with that name combined with their ethos.
It definitely doesn't. The community started in almost complete ignorance of philosophy in general and that philosophy had already covered everything they were trying to.
> I'm not that well versed in analytic philosophy - I think it's come a long way since the early days, so now straddles both sides of the rationalist/empiricist divide.
I'm pretty sure they meant "rationalism" comes from analytic philosophy, which I don't think it does although now at least they've realized it exists. Actual rationalism predates both by approximately three centuries.
And look at all these idiots using the word "computer" to mean an electronic computation device! They must be super ignorant to not realize the word was already taken to mean human beings who perform computations as their job!
I would like to be more rational in my thoughts and decisions. I would like it if others were as well. I find that reading articles by so-called "rationalists", and reading debate around them, seems to help me do that. Not surprising, since that is their exact stated goal as well.
2. Logically sound; not contradictory or otherwise absurd.
3. Healthy or balanced intellectually; exhibiting reasonableness.
4-7. [Math, chemistry, and physics stuff]
Hmm, nothing about social hierarchy or about how you're not allowed to use that word if you're not a 17th century French philosopher. What the hell are you on about, and why are you so concerned about gatekeeping this word?
Rationalism != Rational. Putting an ism on the end of the word makes it a new word. Also, computation is still used in the sense you described.
PS: I'm not sure if it's gatekeeping to expect people who are interested in something to know a word you would learn in the first hour(s?) of learning about it. But if so, I am fully behind it.
> 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken.
Overloads are a thing, you know?
> 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe.
String of characters doesn't mean anything by itself, it can point to meaning (or several).
> 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment.
By whom, and why is their use of the word supposed to be the default?
> I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for.
Lol no. You might want to look back at your comment. Specifically, "I guess". You've done a lot of judging, without doing a shred of work to verify whether your insults are true.
"They're ignorant enough", repeated several times, despite utter ignorance about people you're talking about.
Anyway. "Rationalist" is aspirational, not a claim of one's own rationality.
Sure, this naming kinda sucks because it's unclear.
Lets say you want to contribute to military theory, you feel like you have some good ideas, but you think tactics means the broad goals you mean to obtain with your 'strategy', which is your low-level techniques you used to achieve these goals. How seriously do you think people in military circles would take you? How seriously do you think they should take you?
That's what the rationalist thing is, more or less. I think you can probably argue that the military guys should take you seriously because you have lots of clever ideas, but you can probably also understand it's kinda ridiculous and bonkers.
Pursuit of rationality can be paradoxical in a sense, insofar as believing yourself capable attaining rationality is fundamentally irrational. You aren't a Vulcan, you're a Human. To err is human. All humans are irrational some of the time and if you believe yourself capable of being better than that, you're only proving yourself wrong with that very belief.
Rationality done right is the pursuit of an unobtainable goal that yields better-than-average results even as you ultimately fall short of the ideal. So, basically like any other form of self-improvement. When you inevitably hit a setback, reorient and adjust your approach. But don't beat yourself up when you continue to fall short, because you will. We all will.
This is what rationalists like to refer to as a strawman. Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. The claims are simply that most people have many implicit biases and illogical means, and that there are some ways of bettering your thinking methods.
I think the idea is that the author of the post we're talking about doesn't consider the idea that they may be internally biased in a way that affects their ability to be rational. From my perspective, it looks like they started from the belief that ivermectin is an generally effective treatment for COVID and that "the data" (that is, a properly weighted and filtered version of the publication record) demonstrates that.
To me that shows a lot of overconfidence. Even as I make statements saying that ivermectin isn't a generally effective treatment for COVID, I fully accept that it's possible my reasoning and interpretation of the evidence could be faulty and that some future study could somehow demonstrate a slam-dunk benefit even for countries with no level of parasitic infections, like the US. If that happened (seems very unlikely, but not impossible) I would change my statement (as would the mainstream medical establishment). The author of the above article doesn't really show that level of epistemic humility.
> This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me.
> It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong!
Actually, if it does pan out, score 1 for the conspiracy theorists. If you actually asked them by what mechanism they thought Ivermectin worked, they really had only two answers, and "alleviating strain on your immune system by killing parasites you didn't know you had" was one of them, from very early on.
it's not complicated: people don't like heresy. notice how there are zero comments on this page that deal with the substance of the article in question, instead choosing to find various surface-level reasons unrelated to the findings in the article as cause to internally dismiss it.
if the content of the article was not heresy and instead came from some trusted scientific authority, this would not be the case.
It doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong. Nobody is even remotely interested in engaging what you call the "substance" of the article, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
The people who are working on COVID are too fucking busy to waste their time arguing with kooks who claim they are rational.
Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID science is wrong. Doesn't matter what it's about - if it contradicts official narratives then it's probably going to disappear within an hour or two.
One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.
Thanks. That's a good idea. I already have showdead activated, so I can at least track them down when they disappear.
Wonder if this phenomenon is discussed with dang et al. I am very motivated to find the truth whereever the search takes me, so encountering this kind of collectivist censorship is very frustrating.
The "Do Your Own Research" title is about where he lost me. Without reading, I'm pretty sure the author didn't perform a double blind study himself, nor is he suggesting that we all perform one.
Rationality is only a pathway to reliable information when it makes clear its assumptions (i.e. axioms or postulates) and sticks to logical proof.
Empiricism is only useful when it adequately adopts Occam's Razor to stay focused on the facts and has a clear understanding of the difference between correlation and causality.
Want to disprove a mainstream position? Find a commonly held false assumption or some fact that cannot be explained by the current approaches. Keep it simple and be open to having this point explained with standard methods.
Read T.S. Kuhn if necessary to understand what it typically takes to change a scientific paradigm.
Everything else is just noise with the purpose of making a given community feel enlightened or smarter than the other "fools".
This ivermectin thing is the premier example of motivated reasoning and wishful thinking in the last few years, something which seems lost on the author.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] thread> Step 6: Semi-Permeable Membranes
> One thing that shocked me was how hard it was to discuss even a simple thing with Scott, even when he knew I could have made a big deal about this without giving him an opportunity to make whatever correction he thought appropriate. It felt like communicating through a straw. I get the sense that Scott is busy. Busy and/or surrounded by people who think the world of him; a community of readers that compliment his writing early and often.
This piece also shares several other characteristics of "rationalist" writings: Unnecessarily long and rambling prose, flowery language and dramatic subsection titles when basic text would suffice, hedging in the middle of the article in case the author turns out to be incorrect, and a relentless insistence that the conversation revolve around their experience and some perceived sleights instead of letting the argument stand alone.
Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles.
This author is either obsessed with Ivermectin and the TOGETHER trial or playing a game to pander his Substack to a certain audience who loves this content. His first post was only a month ago but he's already written 11 articles suggesting errors and alluding to conspiracy theories.
Part of the point of the article you're commenting on is that the topic is not, in fact, settled.
Well, how do you know someone is a rationalist? Don't worry, he will tell you soon that he's "updating".
The current medical opinion is that ivermectin only appears to have an effect when it's actually treating an underlying condition (parasitic infection). I don't see that changing any time soon; certainly nobody has shown any truly strong data that resisted multiple attempts at falsification supported ivermectin being really effective against COVID, itself.
As a biologist who works with data- it's realyl easy for smart people to read studies and totally fool themselves. That's what I think happened here.
I don't know if he is the first person to suggest it, but you are incorrect that there is no published research supporting it.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle....
Is it really important for you to be "right" here? I am not attempting to misreprent medical opinion, just give an insight into their current thinking.
Here you can find a long list of countries that use it nationwide as recommended at the national level (which is why I used countries to begin with) https://ivmstatus.com/
Aka “Does America use LSD?” Is presumably different from “Do Americans use LSD?” but it’s not clear what it’s asking.
So, under that argument and my definitions, yes, America uses LSD.
I don't know the exact distributions of medicines around the world but that is a reference data, and I'm familiar with the general profiles of that reference data as well as the history of drug approvals globally.
It's pretty well understood by everybody in the medical field what it means for a country to use a medicine.
I do know what the term gerrymandering is and I ignored your comments about the electoral college (I don't know what they have to do with the current discussion).
I am not carrying anybody's water but my own. Oh, and i guess the parts of the global medical estasblishment that operate in good faith.
I work on a set of principles that I don't particularly need to defend:
1) there is no global conspiracy with a large numbers of members working to create COVID and spread it around, or working to suppress legitimate medical approaches to treatment.
2) the people working in this field, by and large, are smart, but make mistakes, especially in the heat of the pandemic, but over time, as we collect more data across multiple lines of evidence, we'll come to a better understanding of what works well for COVID-infected patients. This took decades with HIV/AIDS and I expect it could take as long with COVID.
3) Armchair internet statisticians are not going to find some details in COVID studies demonstrating some sort of large-scale suppression of ivermectin results. Scientists are not going to run a study that gives unambiguous evidence that ivermectin is not a worthwhile treatment
4) there will continue to be some segment of the internet- a particular type of kook- who continue to insist that the error they found in subsection 9, clause c, is proof that ivermectin is actually a cheap and effective way to treat COVID. Just like we still have HIV/AIDS denialists.
Green accounts nowadays make me wary as well. At one point I put show dead on to help vouch for green accounts that started in shadowban mode, but now it feels like a 50% a new account was created very recently and used to fling shit on flamebait threads.
Around the middle though I picked up, at that point it was a little closer to caricature.
if so, that seems like a net loss for everyone.
these days I am always on the lookout for indications of the existence of heuristics that allow people to dismiss things out of hand using surface-level analysis, and I attempt to be as mindful about these things as possible, in order to most efficiently pursue Truth by attempting to let such things cloud my judgement as little as possible. hopefully this doesn't make me one of these apparently hated "rational" types...!
Maybe? I don't know. :)
It's fun exploring the art of discourse on HN. The moment I added pathos and pathos to the logos I was using, my online conversations got a lot better. It's fun playing around with 2600 year old tradition of rhetoric, trying rhetorical concepts out and seeing how people respond.
I still can't tell if it's sincere or not, but it cast doubt on my absolute certainty that this post was parody.
...and then there is the rest of the community. They cargo-cult all the phrases and hobbies and opinions, but it's like when you wore that first suit: it wasn't yours, you didn't have the shoulders, and everyone but you knew it looked ridiculous. Seriously: even the other well-known people from that community (whose names I've since forgotten) are so obviously cosplaying the intellectualism. Even in the natural science I studied, I would not be able to identify the smart and the not-so-smart papers or professors with such ease.
I’m about to start calling them what they are: Sophists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-kno...
We’re all sinners.
Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living embodiments of second-option bias[1] and confirmation bias, so I don't find it weird anymore that they're still relitigating such issues, I just expect things like this from that crowd, now.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias
Well, this is defensible, since if you read this with s/is true/gets an increased probability of truth/ it's just Bayesianism. Sadly, sometimes people are waiting till later to find out which contradictory thing is true, but sometimes they're just bullshitting.
once i accepted that to be more rational I had to accept that I was not completely rational, I was able to reason more probabilistically. This helps, because there is actually no physical system that is truly logical (except for a bit, and making a logical bit is nontrivial), but rather, the only way to understand physical system is to apply probablistic (not logical) reasoning; think of the difference btween a perfect step function/dirac delta function versus a sigmoid.
Thanks for the pointer to second option bias. I can already see I'm going to waste part of the rest of my day finding the part of rationalwiki where it turns out my beliefs were anticipated by Wittgenstein.
It's ok to say "I don't know, this is very complex, even if I spent many hours reading about this matter". Too many rationalists just go with the option which seems a bit more plausible and then behave as if they have near certainty.
In the end I think my issue that led me off it was that it just ended up being a) judgmental and b) like you, finding that I was just not right enough to justify it!
When I ran into more of those types (our types?) Who are a dime a dozen in a college engineering department my goto quip was:
The scientific method is the admission that rationality and logic are limited; they're just the first step — forming a hypothesis. The rest of it is about how your rationality and logic failed you.
I think this is partially why you find many rationalist and skeptic types not actually doing any science. They haven't had the humility beat into them by science yet, haha.
Similarly with EA, I liked the idea of optimizing charity for the most good, but in practice, the community seems to have no problem dedicating a ton of money, time and effort to MIRI and adjacent groups and people, because they've managed to use their intellectual aesthetics to spook themselves into believing that science fiction is reality. As a result, very real problems people experience today are discounted in favor of whatever scary future AI meme is spooking the community this month.
It's really kind of funny when you think about it, it's just a shame that they suck up so much oxygen in the room.
1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'.
2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'.
3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken.
4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wouldn't be interested in modern science).
5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment.
This is an attractive pitch, so obviously, loads of people jump on. I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for. Every smart white kid from a nice background has been called 'logical' or 'rational' at some point, because (5), so it's a value they identify with. It's a young group, full of energy, because the internet is biased young, and young people go for (2) through (5).
I guess it could be just really perverse usage, but I figure it's more like 'objectivism', or 'scientology', words that sound big and impressive to people who are either dumb, or just not very well informed.
You can't really change a term like rationalism, since it's really one of the biggest terms in philosophy, and philosophers are the kind of people who get upset when people use stuff like 'begging the question' wrong, which everybody does. So even if the 'rationalists' ended up having loads of great insights despite their inauspicious start, it would almost certainly never change the meaning of the word.
Historically, the meaning of "rationalism" changed both trough time and cultures.
The way "rationalism" is being used by the lesswrong crowd is currently accepted for example by Polish dictionaries:
Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ):
3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"
Also from: Williams B., Rationalism, [w:] D.M. Borchert (red.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, t. VIII, Thomson Gale, 2006, s. 239-247, ISBN 0-02-866072-2.
Rationalism in the enlightenment
The term rationalism is often loosely used to describe an outlook allegedly characteristic of some eighteenth- century thinkers of the Enlightenment, particularly in France, who held an optimistic view of the power of sci- entific inquiry and of education to increase the happiness of humankind and to provide the foundations of a free but harmonious social order. In this connection “ratio- nalistic” is often used as a term of criticism, to suggest a naive or superficial view of human nature that overesti- mates the influence of benevolence and of utilitarian cal- culation and underestimates both the force of destructive impulses in motivation and the importance of such non- rational factors as tradition and faith in the human econ- omy. Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Condorcet, among others, are often cited in this connec- tion. Although there is some truth in these criticisms, the naïveté of these and other Enlightenment writers has often been grossly exaggerated. Also, insofar as “reason” is contrasted with “feeling” or “sentiment,” it is somewhat misleading to describe the Enlightenment writers as rationalistic, for many of them (Denis Diderot, for exam- ple) characteristically emphasized the role of sentiment. Reason was praised in contrast with faith, traditional authority, fanaticism, and superstition. It chiefly repre- sented, therefore, an opposition to traditional Christian- ity.
Here there are two contrasts with the seventeenth- century rationalism of Descartes and others. First, this rationalism is not characteristically antireligious or non- religious; on the contrary, God in some sense, often in a traditional sense, plays a large role in rationalist systems (although Spinoza’s notion of God was extremely unorthodox, and it is notable that the opposition of rea- son and faith is important in his Tractatus Theologico- Politicus). Second, the view of science held by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire was different from that of rationalism, being much more empiricist. The central contrast embodied in the term rationalism as applied to the earlier systems is that of reason versus experience, a contrast that is certainly not present in the Enlightenment praise of the “rational.”
I think the current meaning of rationalism (as opposed to empiricism) is vastly more useful than it as yet another 'good-ism', but you're probably right, words can change. It's still stupid that they didn't bother googling the term before calling themselves it.
"Rationalism" descends from analytic philosophy/logical positivism/scientific method types, so they're into experiments now. This is good, because their main program of logical positivism doesn't actually work, so it's kind of a problem that they're still trying to do it.
[0] the world doesn't exist, there's only sense data causing you to imagine a shared world, thinking about things logically is better than trying them out
I'm not that well versed in analytic philosophy - I think it's come a long way since the early days, so now straddles both sides of the rationalist/empiricist divide. At this point, I think it's basically a writing style. You get a lot of analytic philosophers with some pretty wild assertions about reality.
On the other side, somebody like Deleuze is basically a hardcore empiricist, but he's as 'continental' as they come.
It definitely doesn't. The community started in almost complete ignorance of philosophy in general and that philosophy had already covered everything they were trying to.
> I'm not that well versed in analytic philosophy - I think it's come a long way since the early days, so now straddles both sides of the rationalist/empiricist divide.
I'm pretty sure they meant "rationalism" comes from analytic philosophy, which I don't think it does although now at least they've realized it exists. Actual rationalism predates both by approximately three centuries.
This is false. Rationalism predates analytic philosophy by nearly 300 years. Maybe you mean "rationalism" does.
Imagine the hubris to claim ignorance of another when oneself is ignorant that rationalists already know this and it was a mistaken momentum thing.
And look at all these idiots using the word "computer" to mean an electronic computation device! They must be super ignorant to not realize the word was already taken to mean human beings who perform computations as their job!
I would like to be more rational in my thoughts and decisions. I would like it if others were as well. I find that reading articles by so-called "rationalists", and reading debate around them, seems to help me do that. Not surprising, since that is their exact stated goal as well.
As far as what "rational" means:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rational
1. Capable of reasoning.
2. Logically sound; not contradictory or otherwise absurd.
3. Healthy or balanced intellectually; exhibiting reasonableness.
4-7. [Math, chemistry, and physics stuff]
Hmm, nothing about social hierarchy or about how you're not allowed to use that word if you're not a 17th century French philosopher. What the hell are you on about, and why are you so concerned about gatekeeping this word?
Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ):
3. "a position requiring the observance of restrictive standards of the scientificity of knowledge"
I personally prefer that meaning of the word.
PS: I'm not sure if it's gatekeeping to expect people who are interested in something to know a word you would learn in the first hour(s?) of learning about it. But if so, I am fully behind it.
Overloads are a thing, you know?
> 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe.
String of characters doesn't mean anything by itself, it can point to meaning (or several).
> 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment.
By whom, and why is their use of the word supposed to be the default?
> I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for.
Lol no. You might want to look back at your comment. Specifically, "I guess". You've done a lot of judging, without doing a shred of work to verify whether your insults are true.
"They're ignorant enough", repeated several times, despite utter ignorance about people you're talking about.
Anyway. "Rationalist" is aspirational, not a claim of one's own rationality.
Sure, this naming kinda sucks because it's unclear.
That's what the rationalist thing is, more or less. I think you can probably argue that the military guys should take you seriously because you have lots of clever ideas, but you can probably also understand it's kinda ridiculous and bonkers.
Rationality done right is the pursuit of an unobtainable goal that yields better-than-average results even as you ultimately fall short of the ideal. So, basically like any other form of self-improvement. When you inevitably hit a setback, reorient and adjust your approach. But don't beat yourself up when you continue to fall short, because you will. We all will.
Interact with them long enough and you'll come across a whole lot who act like it.
What do you even think I'm strawmanning? That comment is a defense of Scott Alexander and rationalists generally.
To me that shows a lot of overconfidence. Even as I make statements saying that ivermectin isn't a generally effective treatment for COVID, I fully accept that it's possible my reasoning and interpretation of the evidence could be faulty and that some future study could somehow demonstrate a slam-dunk benefit even for countries with no level of parasitic infections, like the US. If that happened (seems very unlikely, but not impossible) I would change my statement (as would the mainstream medical establishment). The author of the above article doesn't really show that level of epistemic humility.
> This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me.
> It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong!
Actually, if it does pan out, score 1 for the conspiracy theorists. If you actually asked them by what mechanism they thought Ivermectin worked, they really had only two answers, and "alleviating strain on your immune system by killing parasites you didn't know you had" was one of them, from very early on.
if the content of the article was not heresy and instead came from some trusted scientific authority, this would not be the case.
The people who are working on COVID are too fucking busy to waste their time arguing with kooks who claim they are rational.
So I worded it more diplomatically, or ambiguously.
Shame; it’s interesting to get challenged. At least I got to read it before it got flushed.
One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.
Wonder if this phenomenon is discussed with dang et al. I am very motivated to find the truth whereever the search takes me, so encountering this kind of collectivist censorship is very frustrating.
The rest reads like gibberish.
Empiricism is only useful when it adequately adopts Occam's Razor to stay focused on the facts and has a clear understanding of the difference between correlation and causality.
Want to disprove a mainstream position? Find a commonly held false assumption or some fact that cannot be explained by the current approaches. Keep it simple and be open to having this point explained with standard methods.
Read T.S. Kuhn if necessary to understand what it typically takes to change a scientific paradigm.
Everything else is just noise with the purpose of making a given community feel enlightened or smarter than the other "fools".