New Rationality

If you look at the social landscape of San Francisco, you will notice a lot fewer rationalists now compared to a few years ago^[1]. The reason for that is that rationalists — at least in my circles — have bullied each other out of existence.

A lot of people who went to the rationalist camps started identifying as post-rationalists, also known as postrats. The same people started trolling the rationalists for being rationalist, leading to more and more people becoming postrats^[2]. A similar process occurred in the Effective Altruism community, to the point where it was appropriate to rename the EA forum to EA-Adjacent Forum (EA Forum for short).

However, making good decisions without bias is obviously the right thing to do, both on an individual level and for the world. Thinking about the consequences of what you do and taking it seriously, calculating the expected values and probabilities, is tautologically a good way to go about life.

The rationalist community has a great track record of being correct. Rationalists predicted how important AI is going to become, predicted the impact of COVID at its very beginning, before anyone took it seriously. The wild rationalist predictions about the singularity so far read like a documentary.

This post-rationalist journey resembles the transition from sincerity to irony, and from irony to post-irony. However, at a certain point, the entire post-irony thing got old, which necessitated the transition to New Sincerity. You cannot break away from the postmodern cynicism of post-irony by finding a way out. Sincerity is great, but you cannot return to it by simply going back to seriousness. You can only find your way through post-irony, to something new. Here is the way New Sincerity was described:

"everything that we said was a joke, but at the same time it wasn't all a joke in the sense that we weren't being arch or we weren't being campy. While we were talking about ridiculous, funny things we were sincere about them."

I think rationality requires something similar: a transition from post-rationality to New Rationality. The movement will define itself as time goes by, but the time to start it is clearly now. Just like how lesswrong.com replaced wrong.com, newlesswrong.com will replace LessWrong. We will make decisions in a thoughtful way and think deeply about the future once again, without making too big of a deal out of it. Once again, you will hear "I claim" and "My priors are" on the streets of San Francisco. You will assume the person saying it was being ironic. However, over time, you will realize their priors were, in fact, correct.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank two of my most rationalist^[3] friends, Yudhi and Sudarsh, for inspiring me to see the value of rationality and good decision-making.