> They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group.
The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist.
The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in.
> They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own.
Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions.
From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors.
The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.
The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist.
The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in.
> They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own.
Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions.
From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors.
The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.