by ajkjk | 2025-06-19 18:12:28+00:00
Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general.

Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Nevertheless the valence of their response reflects their actual emotion on the subject.

In this case: the rationalist philosophy basically creeps people out. There is something "insidious" about it. And this is not a delusion on the part of the people judging them: it really does threaten them, and likely for good reason. The explanation is something like "we extrapolate from the way that rationalists think and realize that their philosophy leads to dangerous conclusions." Some of these conclusions have already been made by the rationalists---like valuing people far away abstractly over people next door, by trying to quantify suffering and altruism like a math problem (or to place moral weight on animals over humans, or people in the future over people today). Other conclusions are just implied, waiting to be made later. But the human mind detects them anyway as implications of the way of thinking, and reacts accordingly: thinking like this is dangerous and should be argued against.

This extrapolation is hard to put into words, so everyone who tries to express their discomfort misses the target somewhat, and then, if you are the sort of person who only takes things literally, it sounds like they are all just attacking someone out of judgment or bitterness or something instead of for real reasons. But I can't emphasize this enough: their emotions are real, they're just failing to put them into words effectively. It's a skill issue. You will understand what's happening better if you understand that this is what's going on and then try to take their emotions seriously even if they are not communicating them very well.

So that's what's going on here. But I think I can also do a decent job of describing the actual problem that people have with the rationalist mindset. It's something like this:

Humans have an innate moral intuition that "personal" morality, the kind that takes care of themselves and their family and friends and community, is supposed to be sacrosanct: people are supposed to both practice it and protect the necessity of practicing it. We simply can't trust the world to be a safe place if people don't think of looking out for the people around them as a fundamental moral duty. And once those people are safe, protecting more people, such as a tribe or a nation or all of humanity or all of the planet, becomes permissible.

Sometimes people don't or can't practice this protection for various reasons, and that's morally fine, because it's a local problem that can be solved locally. But it's very insidious to turn around and justify not practicing it as a better way to live: "actually it's better not to behave morally; it's better to allocate resources to people far away; it's better to dedicate ourselves to fighting nebulous threats like AI safety or other X-risks instead of our neighbors; or, it's better to protect animals than people, because there are more of them". It's fine to work on important far-away problems once local problems are solved, if that's what you want. But it can't take priority, regardless of how the math works out. To work on global numbers-game problems instead of local problems, and to justify that with arguments, and to try to convince other people to also do that---that's dangerous as hell. It proves too much: it argues that humans at large ought to dismantle their personal moralities in favor of processing the world like a paperclip-maximizing robot. And that is exactly as dangerous as a paperclip-maximizing robot is. Just at a slower timescale.

(No surprise that this movement is popular among social outcasts, for whom local morality is going to feel less important, and (I suspect) autistic people, who probably experience less direct moral empathy for the people around them, as well as to the economically-insulated well-to-do tech-nerd types who are less likely to be directly exposed to suffering in their immediate communities.)

Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include it, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reaction from everyone who thinks about the world in terms of that personal duty to safety, because that is the foundation of all morality, and is utterly essential to preserve, because it makes sure that whatever else you are doing doesn't go awry.

(edit: let me add that your aversion to the criticisms of rationalists is not unreasonable either. Given that you're parsing the criticisms as unreasonable, which they likely are (because of the skill issue), what you're seeing is a movement with value that seems to be being unfairly attacked. And you're right, the value is actually there! But the ultimate goal here is a synthesis: to get the value of the rationalist movement but to synthesize it with the recognition of the red flags that it sets off. Ignoring either side, the value or the critique, is ultimately counterproductive: the right goal is to synthesize both into a productive middle ground. (This is the arc of philosophy; it's what philosophy is. Not re-reading Plato.) The rationalists are probably morally correct in being motivated to highly-scaling actions e.g. the purview of "Effective Altruism". They are getting attacked for what they're discarding to do that, not for caring about it in the first place.)