I've never heard of Keganism, I've never heard of your "primary texts of metarationality", and I've never heard of you.

I left this post without any understanding of what "postrationality" or "metarationality" is. That's a failure I think.

My observation is that post-rationalists are much more interested in culture and community type stuff than the Rationalist community. This is not to say that Rationalist community doesn't value culture and community, and in fact it gets discussed quite frequently (e.g. the solstice has been established explicitly to create a sense of community and "the divine"). The difference is that while Rationalists are most interested in biases, epistemology, and decision theory, post-rationalists are most interested in culture and community and related things. Mainstream Rationalists are usually/sometimes, loosely tied to Rationalism as a culture (otherwise the solstice wouldn't exist), but mostly they define their interests as whatever wins and the intellectual search for right action. Post-rationalists, on the other hand, view the world through a lens where culture and community is highly important, which is why they think that Rationalists even represents a thing you can be "post" to, while many Rationalists don't see it that way.

I don't think that Rationalists are wrong when they write about culture, they usually have well-argued points that point to true things. The main difference is that post-rationalists have a sort of richness to their descriptions and understanding that is lacking in Rationalist accounts. When Rationalists write about culture it has an ineffable dryness that doesn't ring true to my experience, while post-rationalists don't. The main exception to this is Scott Alexander, but in most other cases I think the rule holds.

Ultimately, I don't think there is much difference between the quality of insights offered by Rationalists and post-rationalists, and I don't think one is more right than the other. When reading the debates between Chapman and various Rationalist writers, the differences seem fairly minute. But there is a big difference in the sorts of things they write about. For myself, I find both views interesting and so far have not noticed any significant actual conflict in models.

Edit: Another related difference is that post-rationality authors are more willing to go out on a limb with ideas. Most of their ideas, dealing in softer areas, are necessarily less certain. It's not even clear that certainty can be established with some of their ideas, or whether they are just helpful models for thinking about the world. In the Rationalsphere people prefer arguments that are clearly backed up at every stage, ideally with peer reviewed evidence. This severely limits the kind of arguments you can make, since there are many things that we don't have research on and will plausibly never have research on.

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My experience suggests an analogy or continuum? As RationalWiki is to LW, so LW is to so-called post-rationalists.

RationalWiki is highly mission driven, centralized around orthodox summaries on various topics, and not really a conversation at all. Relatively speaking, RW is the most obsessed with purifying ambient culture while sticking to the rituals of peer review (or whatever NSF or NIH insists on for grant funding lately), and are the least confident in their ability to have original thoughts about hard things.

So-called post-rats are full of opinions and aren't particularly interested cargo cult practices around citation and seriousness and wikis and so forth. If you can't judge things yourself, you're probably not in the audience. If weird surfaces scares some of the audience away, there are fewer worries about someone dumb being mislead by a joke. They tend to be professional ML people and/or have read a pile of history books and love a good mind quake. Books and conversation and trolling are essential. Also maybe instead of aspiring to be better at reasoning they aspire to be more normal?

Modern LW is sort of in the middle. It has a wiki, wants to save the world, and prefers posts to be like a journal article with citations... but it also thinks that solid reasoning is more essential than "science" and fan fiction isn't such a bad way to get out a message without dealing with the downsides of respectability ;-)

Another core text is Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The concept it defines is "legibility", summarized in this Ribbonfarm post by Venkat. A legible system is standardized, categorized, manipulable from the top down: the numbered grid of New York City's streets. An illegible system tends to be evolved rather than designed, and makes sense to its users but is hard to explain: the paved cow paths of Boston. The book is about the dangers of demolishing old illegible systems to install new legible ones—a depressingly common historical failure mode. The idea is close to the heart of postrationality, which is more interested in studying seemingly irrational things to see how they tick than it is in optimizing them.

My favorite introductory post is Sarah Perry's The Systems of the World, which categorizes some of her other posts under the umbrella of being able to play flexibly with systems for thinking. Close connections to Chapman's definition of metarationality, here.

(Looks like you accidentally drafted this post and then undrafted it again, which resets the post-date and brings it back to the frontpage. I set it back to its initial posting-date.)

I registered r/MetaRational, r/MetaRationality and r/Meaningness on reddit in case there's any interest in building a reddit community around these topics. I guess it might interfere a bit with the revival of LW? I don't know if there's any value added by me registering these subs, let me know what you think.

(Also, obviously I'd sign over r/Meaningness to David Chapman if he displays interest)

Why is there even any need for these ephemeral "beyond-isms", "above-isms", "meta-isms", etc?

Sure, not all people think/act all the time 100% rationally (not to mention groups/societies/nations) but that should not be a reason to take this as law of physics, baseline, axiom, and build a "cathedral of thoughts" upon it (or any other theology). Don't understand or cannot explain something? Same thing - not a reason to pick randomly some "explanation" (=bias, baseline) and then mask it by logically built theories.

Naively, one would say: since we began to discover logic, math and rational (scientific) approach in general thousands of years ago, there's no need to waste our precious time on any metacrap.

Well, there's only one obvious problem - look who is doing it: not a rational engine but a fleshy animal with wetware processor. Largely influenced even by its reptilian brain or amygdala, with reward function that includes stuff like good/bad, feelings, FFF reflexes, etc.

Plus the treachery of intuitive and subconscious thinking - even if this "brackground" brain processing is 100% "rational", logical and based on our knowledge, it disrupts the main "visible" rational line of thought simply because it "just appears", somehow pops up... and to be rigorous, one has to in principle check or even " reverse engineer" all the bits and pieces to really "see" whether they are "correct" (whatever it may mean).

The point?

As we all know, it's damn hard to be rational, even in restricted and well defined areas, not talking about "real life"... as all the biases and fallacies remind us.

Often it's next to impossible to even simply realize what just "popped up" from the background (often heavily biased - analogies, similarities, etc.) and what's "truly rational" (rigorous/logical/unbiased) in your main line of thought. And there's the whole quicksand field of axioms, (often unmentioned) assumptions, selections, restrictions and other baseline shifts/picks and biases.

So, did these meta-ists really HAVE TO go "beyond" rationality? Because they "found limits"? Or somehow "exhausted possibilities" of this method?

Since, you know, mentioning culture, community, society, etc. does not really sound like the "killer application" for me: these subjects are (from the rationalistic point of view) to a large extent exactly about biases, fallacies, baselines, axioms, etc - certainly much more than about logic or reasoning.

Some of the weird suns are into postrationality, as I would define it, but most of them aren't. (That, or, they keep their affiliation with postrationality secret, which is plausible enough given their commitment to opsec.)

I would add The Timeless Way of Building to the list of primary texts, Chistopher Alexander has been a huge influence for many of us.

Weird Sun Twitter also has a blog, which you may want to include.

You could add Sapiens by Yuval Hariri, which eloquently defends the importance of shared myths and convenient fictions. .. that's old news to some, but not to all.