What happens if you take a bunch of socially inept, above average intelligence, and mentally ill people and have them try to do stuff together? Sounds like a disaster. Well…
“there was that bizarre scandal last year in which someone was accidentally impregnated and then decided not to abort the child, going against what had previously been agreed upon, and proceeded to shamelessly solicit donations from the rationalist community to support her child”
EXCUSE ME DON’T YOU MEAN *HIS* CHILD YOU PROBLEMATIC PIECE OF SHIT OMFG
Leaving aside the whole trans issue, and that suicide baiting at the end is the opposite of charity the commenter claims to have…
I think the issue here is that while institutions like religion supply important guidance by relationship norms like using monogamous marriage as a basis for family formation, the weird supernatural stuff that holds it all together is pretty obviously false, and at other times it really is out of date or punishes harmless groups (e.g., the gays).
Now, we could fall back from the religion to the nation, but nations aren’t particles, they’re waves, so they don’t look real at contrarian depth N = 1. (Whereas I’ve been a sort of double contrarian since high school.)
From that, we could fall back to intuition, but lots of people that claim to be “intuitive” are stupid, manipulative, or trying to justify bullsht. So the Rationalists push that out as well.
And thus people try to fall back to just reason instead, but there are holes in that related, in part, to insufficient information gathering and processing capabilities that brains normally deal with by aggressive summarization and other things, plus still having biases even if you try to remove them.
On the other hand, Rationalists also have less aversion to forbidden shadowspeech, which means some things that are true but forbidden can actually come up in their spaces (as well as things which are false but forbidden).
