# 7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists

*Vices aren't behaviors that one should never do. Rather, vices are behaviors that are fine and pleasurable to do in moderation, but tempting to do in excess. The classical vices are actually good in part. Moderate amounts of gluttony is just eating food, which is important. Moderate amounts of envy is just "wanting things", which is a motivator of much of our economy.*

*What are some things that rationalists are wont to do, and often to good effect, but that can grow pathological? *

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1\. Contrarianism
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There are a whole host of unaligned forces producing the arguments and positions you hear. People often hold beliefs out of convenience, defend positions that they are aligned with politically, or just don't give much thought to what they're saying one way or another. 

A good way find out whether people have any good reasons for their positions, is to take a contrarian stance, and to seek the best arguments for unpopular positions. This also helps you to explore arguments around positions that others aren't investigating.

However, this can be taken to the extreme. 

While it is hard to know for sure what is going on inside others' heads, I know I have taken positions simply by aiming to disagree, rather than to think for myself, and I strongly suspect others of blocking conversations and decisions not from genuinely disagreeing, but by reliably executing a contrarian heuristic. 

I have seen people take what I consider to be ludicrous positions in order to avoid losing face, or perhaps to assert themselves in a conversation as having their own unique position, or out of a fear of orthodoxy or group-think (in response to a group appearing to make an assumption and move on).

Contrarianism is a healthy habit, but mustn't replace thinking, or prevent one from being able to come to agreement.

2\. Pedantry
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It’s great to notice when sentences are not literally true. When a speaker lets an assumption fly, especially if it's an assumption that someone else in the room cares about, that someone can take a little effort to correct it. 

> "You might not think that this minor rephrase or restatement matters, but to be pedantic it is at least *technically* inaccurate, so please let's correct it."

Hewing toward your sentences being technically true, and your arguments being locally valid, makes it far harder for anyone—your allies, your enemies, your fellow countrymen—to fool themselves or others by saying things that sound true but aren’t.

Yet we cannot always achieve maximal precision.

When people say a lot of sentences, there will commonly be ways to nitpick irrelevant and unimportant ways that things could be more precise. There are almost always ways that it could *potentially* be misleading *if* it were read in a *specific* way by someone with *certain* background assumptions.

And too much of that is a massive amount of friction for no gain. You can drain someone’s energy with arbitrary pedantry, and not cut that much closer to reality (especially reality $\times$ usefulness).

Of course, it’s hard always to know where the usefulness lies, so we *must* give space for people to be pedantic. But we should also notice patterns over time of who is improving discourse by a desire for precision, and who is just producing a whole lot of friction.

*(A rationalist said to me that this vice should really be known as nitpicking, not as pedantry, but I ignored their comment.)*

3\. Elaboration
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Communication often takes effort, and it's great that rationalists are often willing to put in the work. But sometimes I don't need a 2,000 word comment or a 5-hour conversation; it's just a waste of my time.

4\. Social Obliviousness
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Humans have a whole host of complicated social calculations going on in them, whether explicitly in people's conscious minds or implicitly in people's lower-level feelings and emotions, tracking status and relationships and attitudes.

Speech can affect these different games all at once, and doing so diplomatically and without upsetting any of the games can be an effortful dance.

In order to focus on the truth of a matter, of what the evidence and arguments imply, it can be helpful to *set aside those concerns for a while* and just focus on the explicit topic of discussion.

I'm not saying it's good to be *unable* to play these social games, of being politic and polite. I am saying it is good, *to be able* not to*.*

However! Obliviousness can cause problems. In the naive situation, being unable to notice that you are causing someone major discomfort or a major attack on their status can cause social backfiring that you didn't intend and could have avoided.

And worse, if you commit to a blind strategy, you can miss people optimizing adversarially *against* you. Perhaps people coordinate to make a certain position socially outcast, while you're just focusing on what's true, and this either ends up with you socially outcast or unable to hold the position that you've shown the evidence and argument led to.

Putting on the blinders a little, and being a bit naive, can help, but if done too much or in the wrong circumstance, it can leave you vulnerable to a large social outfall.

5\. Assuming Good Faith
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*(Also known as 'the principle of charity' or 'being a quokka')*

Going around kind of hoping that people are trying to have actual debate and dialogue with you and care about the truth, helps get into cooperate-cooperate equilibria with others doing this, too.

Furthermore, by the magic of humans trying to fit in and playing the right role in a scene, if you expect good behavior from people and act in a way where that’s the only good way for them to join the social interaction, they will be encouraged to try it out.  It’s an invitation to play a different game.

So on the margin going around behaving as though other people are acting in good faith, will lead to other people joining you in this.

However, too much of this and you will let sociopaths trick you. If someone’s job depends on them believing something, and you assume good faith for the reason why they’re not changing their mind, then you have just added an anti-epistemic anchor into your social space and blinded yourself to it. This will not go well for your epistemics. You want to be offering an olive branch of charity, not a fig leaf.

This is a special case of obliviousness that happens so commonly as to be called out as its own vice.

6\. Undercutting Social Momentum
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People often invest energy in bad ideas. Even worse, sometimes people invest energy in bad ideas *together*. Perhaps it’s a company idea that has no chance of working; or perhaps your friends are going to out to an escape room together that you know will disappoint them.

It's a natural and good response to lower the energy for bad ideas, to provide resistance. If someone in the group is willing to do this, it makes me more trusting of the group's decision-making, that it won't just get caught up in social momentum. (Our culture's way to do this is *counterargument,* since counterargument is the kind of thing that correlates with the idea being good or bad.) But still, I think some people do this more due to temperament, and others do it out of bad habit—they get a rush from controlling the energies of a group.

A friend told me that their local rationalist meetup could never celebrate Petrov Day; it was only good at cutting down other culture’s holidays, and not at having its own holidays. The group couldn’t sustain momentum for caring about something over everyone, people were not able to join in. I think this is a flaw!

It is an old rationalist proverb (originally stated by P. C. Hodgell) “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be”. Let it not fall into the pathological version of itself “that which can be destroyed should be”, and let us remember its complement: “that which can be nourished by the truth, should be”.

7\. Digging Your Heels In
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*(related: "Demanding Redress", "Entitlement to Argument")*

It's important to hold onto your principles, even when inconvenient.

However, sometimes rationalists will make a social scene entirely not function, based on a not-especially-relevant difference in principles.

I have seen brief pleasantries before a meeting expand to take the whole meeting due to an unrelated argument started. I have seen someone spend an entire party arguing at someone in the corner about a minor point made many years prior. I have seen large group social activities very aggressively hit the brakes because of not liking the phrasing someone used. I have seen people spew thousands of words in comment sections in ways that didn't need to happen and weren't worth it until they were no longer on good terms with their interlocutor.

It is good to take a stand on principles, and not let them wither or have people get something important past you. Yet this does not mean it is always the right call; it is sometimes irrelevant, or it is too much effort right now to litigate it and you will overall end a relationship, where you can just as easily bring it up at a later time; and oftentimes arguing the difference isn't worth ending drowning out everything else.

Sometimes digging in your heels to defend a principle, is not called for.

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These, then, are seven vices of rationalists: 

Contrarianism, Pedantry, Elaboration, Social Obliviousness, Assuming Good Faith, Undercutting Social Momentum, and Digging Your Heels In.