For years, LessWrong and the broader rationalist community has faced similar criticism:
Look at these nerds trying to tally up biases in a naïve way that will only lead them further astray from properly understanding themselves and the world.
What does “rational” even mean, how can we define it? How arrogant to name the whole movement “rationalism”.
This weird stuff about quantum mechanics sounds crazy, like the kind of thing cults believe.
(Misconceptions about “rationality” meaning being cold/emotionless like Spock from Star Trek)
As with this article, some of the criticism was true (tallying up official psychological biases turns out to be not very useful, and the community has moved away from that over time), but it’s mixed in with a lot of nonsense and bad-faith or ill-informed attacks. Nevertheless, lots of people (such as myself, long ago) initially heard of LessWrong via criticism of it, and over time our curiosity kept us coming back to learn more until we were eventually won over. But surely it also turned off many others, or prevented rationalism from becoming as prestigious / authoritative / mainstream as it possibly could have otherwise.
Overall, in retrospect, do you think this kind of criticism helped or hurt the rationalist movement?
For years, LessWrong and the broader rationalist community has faced similar criticism:
Look at these nerds trying to tally up biases in a naïve way that will only lead them further astray from properly understanding themselves and the world.
What does “rational” even mean, how can we define it? How arrogant to name the whole movement “rationalism”.
This weird stuff about quantum mechanics sounds crazy, like the kind of thing cults believe.
(Misconceptions about “rationality” meaning being cold/emotionless like Spock from Star Trek)
As with this article, some of the criticism was true (tallying up official psychological biases turns out to be not very useful, and the community has moved away from that over time), but it’s mixed in with a lot of nonsense and bad-faith or ill-informed attacks. Nevertheless, lots of people (such as myself, long ago) initially heard of LessWrong via criticism of it, and over time our curiosity kept us coming back to learn more until we were eventually won over. But surely it also turned off many others, or prevented rationalism from becoming as prestigious / authoritative / mainstream as it possibly could have otherwise.
Overall, in retrospect, do you think this kind of criticism helped or hurt the rationalist movement?