I think this is a valid point. But to some degree both can be true. I often felt when reading some of these type of texts: Wait a second, there is a wealth of thinking on these topics out there; You are not at all situating all your elaborate thinking in a broader context. And there absolutely is willingness to be challenged, and (maybe less so) a willingness to be wrong. But there also is an arrogance that "we are the ones thinking about this rationally, and we will figure this out". As if people hadn't been thinking and discussing and (verbally and literally) fighting over all sorts of adjacent and similar topics in philosophy and sociology and anthropology and ... clubs and seminars forever. And importantly maybe there also isn't as much taste for understanding the limits of vigorous discussion and rational deduction. Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dialectic of rationality and enlightenment, Habermas tries to rebuild rational discourse by analyzing its preconditions. Yet for all the vigorous intellectualism of the rationalists, none of that ever seems to feature even in passing (maybe I have simply missed it...).
And I have definitely encountered "if you just listen to me properly you will understand that I am right, because I have derived my conclusions rationally" in in person interactions.
On the balance I'd rather have some arrogance and willingness to be debated and be wrong, over a timid need to defer to centuries of established thought though. The people I've met in person I've always been happy to hang out with and talk to.
That's a fair point. Speaking only for myself, I think I fail to understand why it's important to situate philosophical discussions in the context of all the previous philosophers who have expressed related ideas, rather than simply discussing the ideas in isolation.
I remember as a child coming to the same "if reality is a deception, at least I must exist to be deceived" conclusion that Descartes did, well before I had heard of Descartes. (I don't think this makes me special, it's just a natural conclusion anyone will reach if they ponder the subject). I think it's harmless for me to discuss that idea in public without someone saying "you need to read Descartes before you can talk about this".
I also find my personal ethics are stronly aligned with what Kant espoused. But most people I talk to are not academic philosophers and have not read Kant, so when I want to explain my morals, I am better off explaining the ideas themselves than talking about Kant, which would be a distraction anyway because I didn't learn them from Kant, we just arrived at the same conclusions. If I'm talking with a philosopher I can just say "I'm a Kantian" as shorthand, but that's really just jargon for people who already know what I'm talking about.
I also think that while it would be unusual for someone to (for example) write a guide to understanding relativity without once mentioning Einstein, it also wouldn't be a fundamental flaw.
(But I agree there's no certainly excuse for someone asserting that they're right because they're rational!)
It may be easier to imagine someone trying to derive mathematics all by themselves, since it's less abstract. It's not that they won't come up with anything, it's that everything that even a genius can come up with in their lifetime will be something that the whole of humanity has long since come up with, chewed over, simplified, had a rebellion against, had a counter-rebellion against the rebellion, and ultimately packaged it up in a highly efficient manner into a textbook with cross-references to all sorts of angles on it and dozens of elaborations. You can't possible get through all this stuff all on your own.
The problem is less clear in philosophy than mathematics, but it's still there. It's really easy on your own terms to come up with some idea that the collective intelligence has already revealed to be fatally flawed in some undeniable manner, or at the very least, has very powerful arguments against it that an individual may never consider. The ideas that have survived decades, centuries, and even millenia against the collective weight of humanity assaulting them are going to have a certain character that "something someone came up with last week" will lack.
(That said I am quite heterodox in one way, which is that I'm not a big believer in reading primary sources, at least routinely. Personally I think that a lot of the primary sources noticeably lack the refinement and polish added as humanity chews it over and processes it and I prefer mostly pulling from the result of the process, and not from the one person who happened to introduce a particular idea. Such a source may be interesting for other reasons, but not in my opinion for philosophy.)
Well, sure, but mathematics is the domain for which this holds maybe the most true out of any. It's less true for fields which are not as old.
I'm not sure if this counterpoint generalizes entirely to the original critique, since certainly LessWrongers aren't usually posting about or discussing math as if they've discovered it-- usually substantially more niche topics.
I suppose you're right about that, so I can't make the argument go through by saying "mathematics" vs "philosophy". Maybe what I should say instead is that as some dialectics advance/technologies develop, subfields of both such things sprout up and have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, and in these cases, the new work will be descended from but not too-essentially informed by the prior work.
Like mathematical logic (in the intersection of math and philosophy) didn't have that many true predecessors and was developed very far by maybe only 5-10 individuals cumulatively, or information theory was basically established by Claude Shannon and maybe two other guys, or various aspects of convex optimization or Fourier analysis were only developed in the 80s or so, it stands to reason that the AI-related applications of various aspects of philosophy are ripe to be developed now. (By contrast, we don't see, as much, people on LW trying to redo linear algebra from the ground up, nor more "mature" aspects of philosophy.)
(If anything, I think it's more feasible than ever before, also, for a bunch of relative amateurs to non-professionally make real intellectual contributions, like noticeably moreso than 100 or even 20 years ago. That's what increasing the baseline levels of education/wealth/exposure to information was intended to achieve, on some level, isn't it?)
Generally conservatives only want to conserve the way the world is as they grow up. Whether that involves respect for prior ideas and thought depends on their current ideas - hence the book burning.
Did you discover it from first principles by yourself because it's a natural conclusion anyone would reach if they ponder the subject?
Or because western culture reflects this theme continuously through all the culture and media you've immersed in since you were a child?
Also the idea is definitely not new to Descartes, you can find echoes of it going back to Plato, so your idea isn't wrong per se. But I think it underrates the effect to which our philosophical preconceptions are culturally constructed.
Because it's a natural conclusion anyone would reach if they ponder the subject. Sorry, I thought I expressed that opinion clearly. I don't think I was exposed to that idea through media by that age.
Odds are good that the millions of people who have also read and considered these ideas have added to what you came up with at 6. Odds are also high that people who have any interest in the topic will probably learn more by reading Descartes and Kant and the vast range of well written educational materials explaining their thoughts at every level. So if you find yourself telling people about these ideas frequently enough to have opinions on how they respond, you are doing both yourself and them a disservice by not bothering to learn how the ideas have already been criticized and extended.
There’s definitely a tension between having a low tolerance for crankery and being open to fresh perspectives. If I’m being charitable to the critics of Rationalism (big “r”), I suppose that they have encountered arguments from Rationalists that struck them as wrong specifically in a way that would have been avoided if the person making the argument had read any of the relevant literature.
How could you say that your views are aligned with those of Descartes and Kant if you have not seriously engaged with their works and what others have written about them?
All serious works in philosophy (Kant especially) are subject to interpretation. Whole research programmes exist around the works of major philosophers, interpreting and building on their works.
One cannot really do justice to e.g. the Critique of Pure Reason by discussing it based on a high level summary of the “main ideas” contained in it. These works have had a major impact on the history of Western philosophy and were groundbreaking at the time (and still are).
I think they basically agree with your point here -- they mention Descartes and Kant to say roughly "I hold basically these ideas, but I don't mention the philosophers' names when I talk about them because 1) I came to them independently, and 2) the people I'm talking to are not familiar with the context so situating our conversation there isn't helpful." Their argument is that you can have philosophical conversations without relying on the context of the canon, and that in a first-level discussion they wouldn't bring up Descartes or Kant.
Here's a very simple explanation as to why it's helpful from a "first principles" style analogy.
Suppose a foot race. Choose two runners of equal aptitude and finite existence. Start one at mile 1 and one at mile 100. Who do you think will get farther?
Not to mention, engaging in human community and discourse is a big part of what it means to be human. Knowledge isn't personal or isolated, we build it together. The "first principles people" understand this to the extent that they have even built their own community of like minded explorers, problem is, a big part of this bond is their choice to be willfully ignorant of large swaths of human intellectual development. Not only is this stupid, it also is a great disservice to your forebears, who worked just as hard to come to their conclusions and who have been building up the edifice of science bit by bit. It's completely antithetical to the spirit of scientific endeavor.
It really depends on why you are having a philosophical discussion. If you are talking among friends, or just because you want to throw interesting ideas around, sure! Be free, have fun.
I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has already been thought of they can just rederive ad hoc when needed (economists are the only other group that seems to have this tendency...) [1]. It turned out every time that the people who had spent decades working on, studying, discussing and debating the field in question had actually figured important shit out along the way. They might not have come with the mathematical toolbox that physicists had, and outside perspectives that challenge established thinking to prove itself again can be valuable, but when your goal is to actually understand what's happening in the real world, you can't ignore what's been done.
> But there also is an arrogance that "we are the ones thinking about this rationally, and we will figure this out". As if people hadn't been thinking and discussing and (verbally and literally) fighting over all sorts of adjacent and similar topics in philosophy and sociology and anthropology and ... clubs and seminars forever
This is a feature, not a bug, for writers who hold an opinion on something and want to rationalize it.
So many of the rationalist posts I've read through the years come from someone who has an opinion or gut feeling about something, but they want it to be seen as something more rigorous. The "first principles" writing style is a license to throw out the existing research on the topic, including contradictory evidence, and construct an all new scaffold around their opinion that makes it look more valid.
I use the "SlimeTimeMoldTime - A Chemical Hunger" blog series as an example because it was so widely shared and endorsed in the rationalist community: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... It even received a financial grant from Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten
Actual experts were discrediting the series from the first blog post and explaining all of the author's errors, but the community soldiered on with it anyway, eventually making the belief that lithium in the water supply was causing the obesity epidemic into a meme within the rationalist community. There's no evidence supporting this and countless take-downs of how the author misinterpreted or cherry-picked data, but because it was written with the rationalist style and given the implicit blessing of a rationalist figurehead it was adopted as ground truth by many for years. People have been waking up to issues with the series for a while now, but at the time it was remarkable how quickly the idea spread as if it was a true, novel discovery.
I don't read HN or LW all that often, but FWIW I actually learned about SlimeMoldTimeMold's "A Chemical Hunger" series from HN and then read its most famous takedown from LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".
> I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".
That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.
While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.
Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.
> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.
This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.
> It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded.
Do you have any examples of this that predate that LW article? Ideally both the critique and its dismissal but just the critique would be great. The original HN submission had a few comments critiquing it but I didn't see anything in depth (or for that matter as strident).
Is this "evidence" one of those silly things that rationalists so much love to talk about?
Don't worry, HN commenters can figure out the truth about Yudkowsky's articles from the first principles. They have already figured out that EAs no longer care about curing malaria, despite https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities only being a Google search away.
At the end, they will give you a lecture about how everyone hates people who are smug and talk about things they have no clue about. The lecture will then get a lot of upvotes.
Did you end up presenting the evidence? I'm following the discussion a few days too late, so my apologies if you've already linked to the evidence and ended up deleting it after.
It was Aurornis who made the claim "Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement" that EnPissant asked evidence for. And nope, he didn't receive it.
Similarly, Aurornis made a claim that "Scott Alexander predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests", when if fact (as the very link provided by Aurornis shows) Scott predicted that the probability of such thing happening was 30%, i.e. it's more likely not to happen.
Elsewhere in this thread, another user, tptacek, claims that "Scott Alexander published some of his best-known posts under his own name". When I asked him for evidence, he said "I know more about this than you, and I'm not invested in this discussion enough to educate you adversarially". Translated: no evidence provided.
.
From my perspective, this all kinda proves my point.
Is the rationality community the only place where people care about evidence? Of course not.
But is the rationality community a rare place where people can ask for evidence in an informal debate and reasonably expect to actually get it? Unfortunately, I think the evidence we got here points towards yes.
Hacker News is a website mostly visited by smart people who are curious about many things. They are even smart enough to notice that some claims are suspicious, and ask for evidence. But will they receive it? No, they usually won't.
And in the next debate on the same topic, most likely the same false claims will be made again, maybe by people who have learned them in this thread. And the claims will be upvoted again.
This is an aspect where the rationality community strives to do better. It is not about some people being smarter than others, or whatever accusations are typically made. It is about establishing social norms where people e.g. don't get upvoted for making unsubstantiated negative claims about someone they don't like, without being asked to back it up, or get downvoted.
You're spot on here, and I think this is probably also why they appeal to programmers and people in software.
I find a lot of people in software have an insufferable tendency to simply ignore entire bodies of prior art, prior research, etc. outside of maybe computer science (and even that can be rare), and yet they act as though they are the most studied participants in the subject, proudly proclaiming their "genius insights" that are essentially restatements of basic facts in any given field that they would have learned if they just bothered to, you know, actually do research and put aside their egos for half a second to wonder if maybe the eons of human activity prior to their precious existence might have led to some decent knowledge.
Yeah, though I think you may be exaggerating how often the "genius insights" rise to the level of correct restatements of basic facts. That happens, but it's not the rule.
And I have definitely encountered "if you just listen to me properly you will understand that I am right, because I have derived my conclusions rationally" in in person interactions.
On the balance I'd rather have some arrogance and willingness to be debated and be wrong, over a timid need to defer to centuries of established thought though. The people I've met in person I've always been happy to hang out with and talk to.