A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “rationalism”. Follow an idea across the archive.
The review examines W.E.H. Lecky's book on the rise of rationalism in Europe, praising its scholarship and insights into the gradual shift from medieval to rational thinking.
Scott Alexander announces the launch of Asterisk Magazine, highlighting various articles from its first issue, including his own piece on wine tasting.
Scott Alexander discusses reader comments on his cyclic theory of subcultures, addressing critiques and expanding on the model's applications and limitations.
Scott Alexander critiques Glen Weyl's anti-technocracy essay, arguing for a more nuanced view of formal mechanisms in decision-making and defending rationalist approaches.
Glen Weyl responds to Scott Alexander's critique of his technocracy essay, clarifying his position and defending his arguments while acknowledging some limitations.
Scott Alexander clarifies that his blog Slate Star Codex is not strictly representative of the rationalist community, and addresses common misconceptions about the blog's relationship to rationalism and effective altruism.
Scott Alexander presents a collection of negative and often insulting testimonials about himself and his blog Slate Star Codex, showcasing criticism of his writing, personality, and perceived ideologies.
Scott Alexander explains postmodernism to rationalists, using the Dark Age debate as an example, and discusses its applications, risks, and critiques.
Scott Alexander defends rationalists against common criticisms, arguing that the movement is self-aware and actively tries to avoid past mistakes while striving for improvement.
Scott Alexander reviews 'Seeing Like A State', examining how state efforts to standardize and control societies often backfire by ignoring local knowledge.
Scott Alexander explains his defensiveness as a response to unfair critiques that risk pushing groups into irredeemable disrepute, and grapples with how to address this issue.
Scott Alexander refutes a blog post criticizing rationalism, arguing it misunderstands the movement and its core values of empiricism, scholarship, and humility.
Scott uses Less Wrong survey data to show that experienced rationalists are actually less likely than newcomers to believe cryonics will work, yet more likely to sign up for it, demonstrating that rationalist training teaches people to act on beliefs rather than making them more credulous.
Scott Alexander rewrites classic fairy tales to illustrate transhumanist and rationalist concepts, each ending with a moral lesson related to these philosophies.
Scott Alexander announces the launch of MetaMed, a company offering personalized medical research, and describes his positive experiences with their rational approach to medical questions.
Scott Alexander defends logical positivism, arguing that despite its flaws, it points to useful ideas about dividing meaningful statements into scientific and logical categories.
Scott presents Aleister Crowley's rationalist approach to mysticism and religious experience, arguing that Crowley's empirically-focused system for achieving enlightenment offers valuable insights that both religious and rationalist perspectives typically miss.
Scott defends a 'soft positivism' in which meaningful statements can be reduced to testable claims, and argues that statements that resist such reduction, like 'Islam is a religion of peace', often smuggle in emotion and prejudice.
Scott shares and comments on favorite rationalist poetry by Pope, Omar Khayyam, Piet Hein and Byron to show that poetry and rationality have long been allies.
Scott proposes testing untestable humanities claims by mixing one sincere argument with several deliberately fabricated ones, inspired by the Ern Malley poetry hoax, and seeing whether experts can tell them apart.
Scott uses a conversation with a Muslim woman who found evolution absurd to show that the absurdity heuristic, as used in Bill Maher's "talking snake" argument, is a bad way to dismiss beliefs.