Half the people bitching about rationalists just want to rescue them lol. The other 80% are irritated at smartness signals without apparent worthiness to wield that power, and nerds are an easy target.

@nosilverv

Rationalists themselves just don’t exactly know what power they’re wielding, socially speaking. They idealistically believe anyone can use reason - and in some sense that’s totally true. But they don’t know reason’s role in Society, and this exposes them to attack.

For society’s relationship to reason, you’d want to understand the systems it wraps analytical power in. You’d want to understand social power around:

Nukes, grades, PHDs, virtue, ‘nerdiness’, ‘researchers’ in war, academic discourse, technocracy, why philosophers get dunked on

Ancient, ‘authorial’ social forces, once placed rationality in its proper place. These systems amble on.

But IME the LWers sort of act like they discovered reason. They don’t know it was once more squarely embedded in society. It had a role & powers it was balanced against.

So they use the old magic all-too-brazenly. It’s out of place. They don’t find themselves in a world where reason has its proper role, so they yank the fuel injector from the great machine. This violates eons-old protocols that society treasures but forgot how to describe.

Possibly everyone on all sides of this bizarre debate knows this already? but they fail to communicate across it so maybe not

Christ, I sometimes think I could personally heal the rift between rationalists and society, if I could just talk to the people involved for long enough

(Continued this line of reasoning here) https://twitter.com/michaelcurzi/status/1298264433379090432?s=20