If you think that the “Rationalists” are cool, calm, detached, etc you’ve bought into their own mythology.

“Conflict vs. mistake” was an incredibly stupid thing to be written by someone whose hobby-cum-passion-cum-career is online discourse, and a transparently antirational way to cheat at that discourse (redefining two normal situational behaviors into an ingroup and an outgroup that can’t be expected to understand each other), but it’s also a perfect example of what you’re asking about.

I analogize it to a theory wherein some drivers only use the gas pedal and some drivers only use the brakes. Obviously that’s ridiculous, but consider what kind of person would even think to say it without evident embarrassment. If you spend your life gently gliding across flat terrain with no obstacles in sight, maybe it’s conceivable you actually could get through your daily travels using only the accelerator and never needing to waste the smallest bit of inertia.

I don’t know if there are any actual 100% Brakists out there, and basically by definition you wouldn’t encounter them in conversations anyway, but Siskind is inventing an ingroup of strict Acceleratorists and only people with certain backgrounds could fit in to that. Their approach to the world is to treat every idea as worthy of civil discussion, devoid of any context, unlike those other people who shut down valuable debate with party-pooping words like “racist” or “misogynist” or “you seem completely uninformed about this subject and you’re just wildly making things up to fit your narrative”. The only way you could get into that habit is if you’d never knowingly encountered a bad-faith argument in your life. Black Americans, for example, do not have the luxury of being unaware that white supremacism never simply ended at any discrete point in the past but rather laundered itself into mainstream talking points about crime and welfare. That kind of naivety about context and subtext is indeed a privilege, granted to those lucky few (and they are now realizing their numerical inferiority) who know racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. only as abstract concepts that exist only outside the conversation and only among other people outside the conversation whose firsthand experience is no reason to invite them in and listen, especially not if they’re just going to say that the edgy topic you’re Just Asking Questions about is the same old bullshit they’ve been hearing for their whole lives and they’re not even going to dignify it with a response anymore. Dignifying the bullshit is the Rationalist project, and the patience to do that is a privilege rather than a virtue.

Is Tabby right? Is rationality a luxury afforded to privileged people who take their security and comfort for granted? Is this why the “rationalist” community seems to consist mostly of college-educated white men?

You’re throwing rationality out with the rationalist water. Rationality is just using logic to navigate the world, I think most everyone does this to different degrees. Some people who push ideas which are actually not all that rational, will nonetheless label them as such. Don’t get it twisted.

I don’t think rationality is opposed to emotionality. They can exist in concert. Overly emotional messaging may impact the quality of it’s reception, but hey at least it’s honest.

“Neoreaction a Basilisk” is a weird book (it had a lot more Paradise Lost than I expected), but it made a good point about emotion, empathy, and rationality.

When we try to eliminate emotion from our thinking in order to be rational, we’re much better at eliminating the emotions of others than we are at eliminating our own. We’re very good at convincing ourselves that we’ve eliminated our own emotions, but the more that you look at the reasoning about social and moral questions of people who think of themselves as super-logical, the more that you notice that they start with their fears as their axioms, and then construct a series of logically air-tight arguments to get to their pre-existing prejudices as conclusions.

You’ll notice the same thing in their selection of academic sources. Somehow every study that confirms their fears and prejudices is solid science, and every study that contradicts is somehow fatally flawed.

That’s not unique to rationalists, of course. That’s pretty much the human condition. Confirmation bias and all that. There are two ways that rationalists tend to go more wrong than the rest of us, though.

First, they are even more blind than the average person to the fact that they’re doing it. I remember reading about a study that a psychology professor would do on her freshman psych classes. Students were presented with two fictional candidates for police chief. One group of students were given a man who was street-smart running against a woman who was university-educated. The other group of students were given a woman who was street-smart running against a man who was university educated. Students had to pick a police chief, give their reasoning, and also rate how logical they were.

Result: The more logical that a student rated themselves, the more likely they were to pick the man no matter what his qualifications were. They were very good at explaining why their choice was the most logical choice (“street-smart is obviously better because…”, “university-educated is obviously better because…”), but the more logical they thought they were the worse they were at recognizing how much their conclusions were the result of their prejudice rather than their logic.

That’s only one study, of course, but it does fit the experience I’ve had both a) being a “super-logical” young white man myself and b) growing older and hopefully a little wiser and noticing it in others. (Noticing this pattern is partly my own confirmation bias at work, of course, but I’m getting a bit better at recognizing that.)

(I have some half-baked theories about the socialization of smart, sensitive young white men and how they end up being obviously tightly-wound balls of emotion to everyone else while experiencing themselves as perfectly calm and rational, but perhaps that’s for another post.)

So that’s one effect of believing that you’d eliminated emotion from your thinking. The second effect is that you lose empathy. You can’t disconnect from your own experiences, but you can disconnect from those of others. That is seen as a virtue if you’ve fooled yourself into thinking that you’ve eliminated your own emotion. James Damore said it explicitly: “De-emphasize empathy: Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.”

And this comes around to the question that you asked. Various scholars have pointed out that people who are lower on the social pyramid have to exercise their empathy. In order to stay safe, they have to be able to get into the minds of the people who a) control the resources they need to stay alive and b) could hurt them with minimal consequences. “Women are mind-readers, man,” is a direct consequence of structural inequality. Women have to be. They have to practise the skill. Their mothers know this and start teaching them from a young age. They put the hours in.

That’s the way, I think, in which “rationality” is a privilege. You can get a good job even if you’re an emotionally oblivious asshole who thinks of yourself as a Nice Guy. (I’ve benefited from that myself, as it happens.)

You used to be able to get a wife who’d use her empathy to cater to your whims, too. That’s changing as some aspects of structural equality break down, and I think it’s one of the fractures that men who’ve been raised to be I’m-not-scared-or-angry-I’m-perfectly-calm-and-rational-right-now have to face. Do you choose to try to force women back into their subordinate position by convincing them that they’re “naturally” more empathetic than men while ignoring all the work they have to put in to become that empathetic? Do you choose to continue to be super-logical and manly and deny your emotions and empathy and become another middle-aged male suicide statistic? Or do you develop your emotion and empathy and become, hopefully, a bit more of a well-rounded person?

I.e., do you give up some of the privilege of being oblivious to emotion and put in some of the hours needed to learn the empathy needed to treat others as equals? (Along the way you’ll probably end up making the same mistakes that a typical grade-five girl does as she is forced to learn this stuff. Some things will go wrong and hurt. All part of learning.)

So… umm… evidence-based pragmatism: Make sure that you’re not getting your evidence just from people who advertise themselves as calm, rational, evidence-based pragmatists. The evidence you get will be limited by their blind spots. A moral outlook that’s formed by a combination of denying the effect of your own emotions while actually denying the emotions of others is going to be twisted in the ways that you see on a daily basis over on TheMotte. The evidence they present you with will be, too. Seek out other perspectives. Read the SJW scholars that they make fun of.

Wow, that’s a real wall of text. Apologies for the lack of sneer.

So let’s talk about Mistake Theory.

As per Scott Alexander’s “Mistake Theory”, the idea that the ills of the world can be solved by treating them as an intellectual exercise seemed like a panacea compared to the emotional turmoil and messiness I saw in leftist spheres– a pragmatist’s dream come true.

The problem with “Mistake Theory” is that it fundamentally has no response to bad faith. If you assume that your disagreements are, first and foremost, about a failure to understand each other or mistakes in how you acquire or examine the data, it becomes entirely too easy to be tricked by people whose interest is not in discovering the truth, but in having a certain debate for the sake of having that debate. And if you assume that conflict theorists are then just unwilling to debate in general, you can then ignore when people point out that there is, in fact, definitely an underlying conflict, and that it isn’t just about making mistakes.

And they can be wrong over and over again, and that’s fine too. Just keep proving them wrong and it’ll all get better. Oh, sure, lots of people may point out that this behavior drives away certain other people who aren’t interested in those debates, that it’s the same discussions over and over, and that they keep using really bad sources… But hey, it’s not bad, you’ll surely find common ground sooner or later, right? It’s not like fascists have a long track record of debating things on false pretenses to further their agenda… right?

…Right?

This is why /r/TheMotte is full of nazis. Because this is exactly the behavior that fascists exploit. They rely on people taking them charitably. At taking their claims at face value and engaging with them. They know they’re full of shit. They know they’re not arguing to convince people. But you’re not allowed to say that, because that’s conflict theory thinking. And hey, look, there’s at least one moderator there who is extremely eager to display exactly how this works.

There’s a passage by A.R. Moxon, which I will now quote at length, that summarizes this problem beautifully:

Once you are willing to debate whether one group of people or another should be abused, then abusing and expelling people from society is something that is up for debate. It’s on the table. It’s listed on the exchange.

If we are debating whether there ought to be laws preventing trans people from bathrooms, then we’re already debating the wrong thing, and as a result, we have lost.

If we are debating whether there should be a Muslim ban, or whether or not health care should be kept from the poor, or whether gay people should be banned from marriage, or black people killed by cops, or if women should be paid the same or not, or if Native Americans and descendents of slaves deserve reparation for systemic and ongoing theft, or if hungry people should have food, or if thirsty people should have water, or if disabled people should have access to buildings, we have already lost.

Those things don’t go on the table. Because once they are on they are on the table, they have entered the realm of the things we consider. Then they enter the realm of the possible.

Debate them? OK, why not? They’re lying. They’re wrong. You’ll win. Easy. Now debate again.

Again. Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again. The idea of the lie is entering the public consciousness.

Again. The idea of lying is entering the public consciousness. The idea is taking hold, that debate is a thing where people argue by lying. They’re lying, you’re lying, but it’s all lies anyway, right? Both sides.

Again. The lies are getting thicker, but more hidden by their ubiquity. Again. The lies are getting better, more convincing. Again. They’re being focus-tested in the marketplace of ideas. Again. There are bumper stickers and signs. Debate again. You have to win every time, but why are you afraid to engage an idea? You’re in the marketplace. The best ideas always rise to the top. Right?

Again. There are protests in favor of direct and shocking action, premised upon the lie. Again. There are hats, red hats, a sea of them. Again. Again. Here are refugees stranded. Again. Here are raids tearing families apart. Again. Here is a mosque defaced. Again. A man in a turban attacked. Again. An elderly woman being run down by storm troopers in the streets. Again. More raids. Again.

Unthinkable. Except it isn’t. We’ve been thinking about the unthinkable, like very open-minded and reasonable people, for years.

So being charitable to Scott, the problem with his idea of “mistake theory vs. conflict theory” is that if you can’t recognize when you’re in conflict with someone on a more fundamental level, you are going to get played every single time.

But I’m not really super interested in being charitable to Scott, because at the point where your community and the spin-off community start filling up with nazis and you actively refuse to do anything about it, I’m not super interested in assuming you’re operating in good faith if you can’t update your priors to notice that your little walled garden has filled up with stormtroopers - and that was before those emails were leaked that showed just how disingenuous he was being.

I can’t really do it better justice than /u/Epistaxis did, but I will say this: if you reread some of Scott’s writing from the assumption that he believes in scientific racism and is not particularly opposed to fascism, you may find that certain passages that made very little sense, or certain mistakes you wouldn’t expect someone like him to make, suddenly seem… different.

As for Tabby being right… Well, there’s some useful ideas in there. It’s certainly a lot harder to act detached and like you don’t give a shit when the issue being discussed is concrete for you and abstract for the person you’re talking to. The expectation that all debate be held in that specific tone is absolutely a matter of privilege. (And also another trick the nazis use - very calmly and carefully say the most hideous, horrendous, offensive things imaginable, then claim people are being irrational when the response is not made in the same calm and careful tone.) But the problem with Rationalists as a group goes far beyond issues of tone or privilege. It is a movement which is either very easy for nazis to infiltrate or which is designed to be infiltrated by nazis, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming the latter.

That being said, I hope you’ll indulge a little side hobby of mine…

I’ve become a bit disillusioned with some aspects of the left– mostly the categorical “cancelling” of people who don’t adhere to some impossible standard of morality and virtue

Is now a bad time to posit that you’re falling for a far-right smear campaign more than anything else? Because most people getting “canceled” aren’t suffering for not living up to an impossible standard. Often it’s for really basic, “don’t be a bigoted shithead” reasons. Often, it’s justified. But the line between “justified” and “unjustified” is intentionally blurred, in order to treat them both as examples of the same fundamental phenomenon… Even though, as Will Wilkinson points out:

But even if it’s not healthy, overall, it’s crucial to bear in mind that sometimes people say things so shitty on social media that they deserve to be an object of collective outrage and deserve to lose jobs, opportunities, social standing, etc. I’m sorry to belabor the point, but these cases are fundamentally different from those in which somebody didn’t deserve to be mobbed and didn’t deserve to lose jobs and opportunities, but was mobbed and fired anyway. It’s the difference between justice and injustice — an important distinction not to lose track of.

Will we always or even often agree about whether somebody deserves it in any given instance? Of course not. It’s worth arguing about! But whether somebody did or didn’t deserve what they got in a particular case is a much different discussion than whether “cancel culture” threatens the imminent demise of the American experiment in liberty. Indeed, you can’t establish that there is an ominous trend unless you establish that there’s something ominous about specific cases. Which means you have to pay attention to the details of specific cases.

(This is coming from a guy who recently lost his job over a tweet about unity which I personally found hilarious.)

That Scott has not been cancelled. And the most recent bouts of cancellation are about mr potatohead and dr seuss (while in the real world 8 out of 10 recently banned books are about lgbt+ topics) raises a few questions about your information bubble.

Dont confuse people talking about things they dislike with cancellation.

E: Making my edit a new post so OP sees it.

Why does emotional mean irrational or out-of-control? When you consider “evidence” do you only consider your own evidence admissible?

Quoting a previous post of mine which may help.

Thing is, it’s really hard to explain to someone who is the dominant majority in any space. It’s literal fear of safety; it’s not an exaggeration.

When I go to a new place there tends to be a non-zero chance that I’ll get aggression due to my skin colour; ranges from people shouting at me to get the f*ck back to whatever country they think I’m from, to pointing and staring. When I was young I was pissed on by a group of racists; and heard a racial slur maybe once every couple of weeks.

Thing is, that it means when a stranger talks to me at all, it makes me wary; are they going to have a go at me? Am I in bodily danger? If I run is anyone going to help? Will the police/authorities turn a blind eye?

It’s tiring. Like /really/ tiring. And perhaps you’ll understand if I’m not overly charitable towards you if you start going on about my ethnic race in front of me or any form of race science, however well-meaning you think you are.

And if you let those people into your spaces; don’t blame me if I leave your community because these debates sound about as good faith as a Neo-Nazi asking whether Hitler had a good reason to kill the Jews to a slavery apologist wondering whether there was an underlying reason why Africans were the vast majority of the Atlantic slave trade.

Is rationality a privilege?

No but sitting on the internet all day reading and reading and reading about obscure political ideas usually is.

Anyway, in recent months I’ve become a bit disillusioned with some aspects of the left– mostly the categorical “cancelling” of people who don’t adhere to some impossible standard of morality and virtue, non-intersectional identity politics (wokeism), class reductionism, and the infighting.

If you even know what class reductionism is you’re just online too much.

This led me to burnout, which in turn led me down the rabbit holes of “rationalism” and “enlightened centrism”.

Now it really sounds like you’re online too much.

Is Tabby right?

Tabby is correct about why people hate SJWs for sure.

Is rationality a luxury afforded to privileged people who take their security and comfort for granted?

That’s not what Tabby said, here look again:

TABBY. Look, this detached, ironic, pretend-not-to-give-a-shit posturing that white men mistake for rationality is really just the self-celebration of comfortable, privileged people with nothing at stake.

So it’s not about rationality being only available to the privileged but the privileged mistaking back-patting for rationality.

Is this why the “rationalist” community seems to consist mostly of college-educated white men?

A good way to judge political groupings is not just by how they think but what they prioritize. Modern internet rationalist communities are much like libertarians in that huge amounts of effort are spent struggling against situationism. Why? Because people who are pleased with their position in life want to believe they ‘earned’ it or at least that they ‘deserve’ it, which requires something specific to the person. In libertarian circles this focus expresses itself by defending meritocracy as good and real and realizable. As far as I can tell many rationalists have essentially given up on meritocracy (as usually conceived) as unrealizable but then move down one rung to explain how actually it’s okay that opportunity isn’t spread evenly and parents constantly subvert fairness for their children and so on because it’s really all about the genes of the kid and most of them end up at a fair place in the hierarchy because their parents ended up at a fair place for their genetics and so on. Understanding that I think we can change your statement a bit to be more accurate:

Is this why the “rationalist” community seems to consist mostly of well paid white collar workers?

Anyways in summation, you should probably just go engage in some real life local politics. Flitting between obscure ideologies on the internet is basically a fool’s errand.

Yudkowsky actually wrote about this.

Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything. It’s embarrassing to feel—it’s just not done in polite society. You should see the strange looks I get when people realize how much I care about rationality. It’s not the unusual subject, I think, but that they’re not used to seeing sane adults who visibly care about anything.

I suspect that Yudkowsky’s movement attracts a lot of people who are invested in that appearance of Spock-like “rationality,” because they’re privileged enough to not have an intrinsic motivation to get visibly upset about social justice. Yudkowsky correctly identifies this conflation of detachment and rationality as an error — but since he also isn’t particularly interested in social justice he channels all that emotional zaniness into his ideas about rationality and AI. That’s probably why he seems way crazier than Scott even though they have exactly the same beliefs about everything.

Apologies if this post isn’t entirely coherent or appropriate for this sub. I’m just trying to reconcile my inclination towards “evidence-based” pragmatism with my anti-capitalism…if that makes sense.

I’m also working on this, and I think the answer involves reading actual books instead of just absorbing the opinions of whatever internet clique you happen to be in.

Want to chime in to second everyone saying there’s no conflict between emotion and reason. People who assume there is are often projecting their own issues onto other people—they would prefer not to think about certain upsetting facts, so they decide talking about those facts at all (or at least, without euphemism) is something only “emotional” people do and is therefore to be avoided by anyone who wants to be “rational”. But of course there’s nothing rational about ignoring uncomfortable facts.

> Is Tabby right? Is rationality a luxury afforded to privileged people who take their security and comfort for granted? Is this why the “rationalist” community seems to consist mostly of college-educated white men?

I mean kind of? Those college educated white guys are extremely emotional, they just display it in ways that the average person don’t associate with screaming pink-purple enby outside Mitch McConnell’s home. Their displays of emotional outbursts are giant 15 paragraph emotional narratives with hyperlinks to great authors or their Rationalist buddies’ 20 paragraph diatribes. They don’t grab poster boards and stand outside of Alphabet INC’s headquarters and scream about how they’re killing technological progress. They meme about it on the interwebs, and never on mainstream twitter, facebook, etc. Only their own little fiefdoms where they can control the narrative better.

Is Tabby right?

Yes. Basically. Tabby is correct, and you only need to think about who it benefits for the world to view detached and calm people as correct to see why. It’s the powerful. The powerful benefit most from the idea that calm and detached people are automatically viewed as more correct.

There’s a concept called “Tone Policing” which is a form of ad hominem attack that used to happen a lot more often on the right until the left started really pushing hard against it by attacking how right wing people turn into crybabies whenever Lola Bunny gets breast reduction surgery. Basically, tone policing is where they attack the way an argument is delivered rather than the content of the argument itself. This has an unfortunate side effect where a person sitting on a stack of cash can very calmly say “No” when starving people beg them for food. This calm condemnation of them to starvation might, you know, upset them a little bit. Becoming upset immediately makes them wrong. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the problem with this. The people who are most able to communicate calmly and quietly are the people who don’t have any skin in the game. And who has the least skin in the game? Well, the privileged. Men are less likely to be offended when talking about the rights of women’s bodies. White people are less likely to be offended in discussion over black “crime” statistics. Cisgender people less likely to be offended when discussing trans rights, able bodied people less likely to be offended when talking about disabled people. You get the idea.

Related: This can lead to a pretty awful social transmission of ideas where people come to believe that non cishetwhitemales are inherently irrational. Here’s a study talking about children, but keep in mind that children grow up into adults who continue to hold the views they were taught as children if nothing challenges them to change said views. You might find it interesting.

Abstract: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620953132

Full Text: https://psyarxiv.com/zkjyr/

I’m sorry i didn’t react to your main question btw, so posting a bit of that now. And yes Tabby is mostly right. But people on the left/progressive/anti racist side do know this tendency of white liberals to want cool. That is a reason they picked Rosa Parks to support and not any of the other less acceptable to liberals people who refused to sit in the back. (How fucking horrible must this have been for the black people and allies who were trying to get rid of all the racist bullshit in the USA, having to go ’sorry we can’t get behind this person because they are not likeable enough for the white people to consider black people humans).

Just look at how often ‘but he was no angel’/drugs something was repeated about George Floyd. Like that excused murder.

And that the Rationalist community is against overly emotional arguments is probably why a lot of ‘im progressive honest, but…’ types get drawn to that community. I certainly liked that at first, as I do think niceness and civility is important, but not when we are discussing if some people are human or not.

Yes, you have already hit the nail on the end.

To paraphrase a quote I only half remember:

“If you have a forum where peoples humanity is regularly up for debate, eventually the only people in that forum will be the people whose humanity is never up for debate.”

Rational debate communities like TheMotte always end up being composed of mostly straight white dudes not because straight white dudes are more rational, or naturally inclined towards that kind of thing, or anything like that - its because they are the one demographic who can exist in a space like that without having to constantly defend their basic humanity from attack.

In a way, its a lot harder for straight white dudes to see the Grift, and I honestly feel bad for some of the people I used to argue about because of that. It’s a lot easier to spot all the ways a typical alt-right argument against feminism is dumb when you’ve already seen those exact same arguments made against your own demographic, and straight white dudes don’t often get that experience.

The easiest way to spot this phenomena in the wild is to engage those same cool, collected dudes on topic like the patriarchy, rape culture, or feminism and see how they react. Surprise, surprise, its almost always with the same level of emotion they condemn their opponents of when debating something like gay marriage or BLM. Because by changing the topic to feminism/etc…, you have entered an area of discussion where, finally, they feel like their demographic is under attack - and suddenly they aren’t so cool anymore.

If you want an example of this, just go read ‘Untitled’, and compare it to other articles written by Scott Alexander. Feminism (and anti-racism, but feminism gives the best examples imo) is one of the few areas where straight white dudes feel that their demographic is under attack, and unsurprisingly it is where their apparent monopoly on ‘calm’ ends.

I don’t have a take on this issue but just wanted to say that i really love Contra. God bless her.

“Rationality” as an aesthetic and as an actual practice are not the same. Anger and rationality are not incompatible. Anger and “rationality” are.

Rationality (which is not rationalism) is a duty; “pretend-not-to-give-a-shit posturing that white men mistake for rationality” is a privilege.

I would like to emphasise that your title seems likely to get you worse responses than your text. In your text you speak of a number of factors (rationality, knowledge, compassion, pragmatism, etc.). Each of those seems distinct. But your title puts the focus on rationality.

Second, I would note it’s not really obvious the rationalist community practises treating all disagreement as an intellectual exercise. Ignoring Alexander’s jokes about destroying people or EY’s accusations that his opponents are evil, rationalists certainly seemed to harass the nytimes for its article. I don’t think that means you can’t find the principle inspiring, but a lot of principles are. It seems to me that the question is how they can be implemented.

Third, it’s not obvious to me how cancel culture or really anything you listed is irrational.

The rational-cynical read would be that canceller want social clout and use cancelling as a way to gain power, cast out rivals, or open up new social spaces for themselves. Followers might acquiesce out of fear, misinformation, or similar desires.

You might say that the rational-cynic still behaves irrationally in they are given over to false beliefs (they actually think the thing they are complaining about is bad), but if you think rationality is not itself motivating, then deluding yourself might be rational insofar as it motivates you to achieve your goals.

I don’t think the above is the main cause of the phenomena you listed though.

Another read would be that their emotions are rational. Why you seem to draw a distinction between emotionality and rationality, it seems quite plausible to me that emotions might be rational if they properly fit the stimulus.

For example, being afraid of a shark swimming in open waters seems rational insofar as the shark could harm you and fear is the appropriate reaction to entities that could harm you.

So, in that case, maybe their individual feelings and actions are rational (being mad at someone online and posting about it), but the aggregate result is in some way bad.

I think the issue here is that “rationality” is an ambiguous term. Does it mean instrumental rationality, traditional rationality, some more substantive type of rationality from which all obligations flow (e.g. something like Kant, I think)?

Fourth, I feel part of the issue is imprecision in what exactly is bothering you. I’ve mentioned the question on the nature of rationality, but I’d add that one of your complaints notes that the standards in the left are impossible to live up to. That leads me to think that what is bothering you isn’t vague irrationality, but instead something more like injustice or cruelty.

I would certainly think that if a standard is impossible to live to, then it would be unjust to punish someone for failing to do so, since I like to ground punishment in retribution and think one therefore out only be punished for actions they are morally blameworthy for, and if they can’t live up to the standard, they aren’t morally blameworthy.

So you should then investigate to see a) if the standard actually is impossible or if it’s just hard and b) whether those you disagree with concern themselves with punishment and blameworthiness in the same way.

Perhaps I misread you there. Perhaps you are concerned more with compassion, which would lead you to oppose such punishments even if they were blameworthy. Or perhaps you, as a pragmatist, merely think that punishment is ineffective to achieve the social goals you want. Speaking of the impossibility just signals the futility more.

But either way, I think it’d be beneficial to try to be specific about what feature of the behaviour is upsetting or bad to you, rather than focusing on a very broad and contested concept.

Fifth, I’ll also note that even Tabby says that it’s not rationality but a particular style or disposition (coolness). Even Justine says the issue is not the correctness or the force of the arguments, which she concedes “social justice warriors” have but they style or attitude of the advocates. If I buy into the idea that emotions can be rational, either for instrumental or fitting reasons, then I might agree a bit with Tabby. It’s not that rationality is a privilege, it is instead that a particular style is a privilege and perhaps itself irrational contingent on the account of rationality at play and the degree to which buying into that style causes people to discount good arguments.

I’ll also note that Tabby gives a shorter version of my argument in your quote, yet you seem to discount it without comment.

it’s a shame there are no transcripts of her videos. I’m not really a fan of super-long youtube videos but there’s some pretty good content here that would work just as well in text.

categorical “cancelling” of people who don’t adhere to some impossible standard of morality and virtue

This is how it’s sold by reactionaries, but the reality is completely different. These supposedly impossible moral standards are pretty damn low. It’s bog-standard shit like “don’t be racist”. Secondly, “cancelling” isn’t what it’s made out to be. How are these poor, unfortunate cancel-ees doing? They’re fine. They’re doing just fine.

More importantly, people who say shitty things that get them “cancelled”, they’re not concerned about “impossible moral standards”. And the vast majority are not even sorry. They just don’t care for criticism. They want their critics to be silenced like they were in the 20th century when no one had horizontal access to celebrities. It really is that simple. That’s the motte (“what of free speech!”) and bailey (“No one should be allowed to criticize my clear and obvious racism!”) here.

!emojify

whom everyone cringes

Yes basically. Rationalists disdain politics (aka “conflict theory”) because it’s “uncool”; that it can do this is a mark of privilege.

Because they tend to be nerds who were disdained by the mainstream they don’t think of themselves as privileged; it’s this attitude rather than any innate racism or anything that makes them so vulnerable to the right. White nationalism, men’s rights, and fascism are all movements of privileged classes who feel oppressed by genuine liberation movements.

They are unusually systematic in their efforts to not see their own privileges. SSC in particular. I have a bunch of writing about this linked from http://www.hyperphor.com/ammdi/pages/conflict-theory.html

“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”- Leo Tolstoy- Anna Karenina

I’ve personally found the works Emmanuel Levinas to strike the best and most accurate balance between the upsides and downsides of “rationality”. For Levinas it is not because we can reason that we can be compassionate, but because we can be compassionate that we can be reasonable.

Here are some starting points if you’re curious.

Kevin Houser- Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Towards an Ethical Metaphysics of Reasons https://www.academia.edu/36787319/Levinas_and_Analytic_Philosophy_Towards_an_Ethical_Metaphysics_of_Reasons

“The orthodox explanatory order, which explains our responsibility to one another in terms of normative reasons, is backwards. For while such reasons may explain what we are responsible for in a given case, they do not explain why we are responsible to begin with.Worse: we seem to have a standing responsibility to have reasons with which to justify our acts and attitudes. But the general responsibility to have justificatory reasons isn’t itself something reasons could justify. Levinas’s suggestion: Stop trying to explain interpersonal responsibility in terms of reasons. Start explaining reasons-giving as an expression of a responsibility-relation. We will then see we are not, first, responsible to others because we have reasons to be. On the contrary: we are first responsible to one another, and only this explains why and how we have reasons.”

See also:

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin: Before the Voice of Reason Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics

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Just ignore the woke people and be on the left. A lot of the most SJW types are piss poor at actual leftist thought anyway, and have zero class analysis ability. Be a dirt bag leftist, listen to Cumtown and vibe.

I’ve become a bit disillusioned with some aspects of the left– mostly the categorical “cancelling” of people who don’t adhere to some impossible standard of morality and virtue

Don’t worry, they’re all liberals or downwardly mobile professionals. The real vanguard of the working class is just around the corner.

Generally speaking, any social movement that is founded on navel gazing is going to be filled to the brim with people who have too much time on their hands.

In the modern era that’s going to largely be the well to do, and young men without stable careers or relationships.

The rationalist community is mostly made up of college-educated white dudes because it actively discriminates against anyone who doesn’t fall into that demographic.