Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging

1. According to the survey, only 13% of SSC commenters identify as rationalists. Almost none of the rationalists I know IRL comment on SSC. Saying “rationalist community” when you mean “SSC comments section” or vice versa will leave everybody pretty confused.

2. Not every blog by a Christian is “a Christian blog”, and not every blog by a rationalist is “a rationalist blog”. I would hope blogs by Christians don’t go around praising Baal, and I try to have some minimum standards too, but I don’t want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special “rationality” work beyond showing people interesting problems.

3. Or consider the difference between a church picnic and a monastery. Both have their uses, and the church picnic will hopefully avoid praising Baal, but there’s a limit to how Christian!virtuous it can get without any structure or barriers to entry. A monastery can do much better by being more selective and carefully planned. Insofar as SSC makes any pretensions to being “rationalist”, it’s a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.

4. Everything above applies to SSC’s engagement with effective altruism too, except 100x more.

5. I’ve been consistently skeptical of claims that rationality has much practical utility if you’re already pretty smart and have good intuitions and domain-specific knowledge. There might be exceptions for some domains too new or weird to have evolved good specific knowledge, or where the incentives are so skewed that the specific knowledge will optimize for signaling rather than truly good work (and maybe 99% of value is in domains like this, so maybe I’m not saying much). In any case, if rationality has much practical utility for your everyday life, you won’t find that practical utility here.