Rationality Quotes December 2014

The authors provide more arguments than ones about telomeres. Further, they charge that he's misrepresenting evidence systematically, not just making specific proposals that turn out to be wrong. I agree giving prizes for increasing the lifespan of mice is a good idea, but that's not a very strong reason to support him. Do you have examples of novel scientific ideas he's had that have turned out to be useful?

I will definitely be going over this, it looks very helpful. Thank you for making this.

which sounds problematic as one of its aims is to define pseudoscience.

?

They explicitly say that there is no rigid definition distinguishing pseudoscience from legitimate science. They claim that in order to distinguish between them it's necessary to point at specific instances of misleading behaviors, and they enumerate these behaviors at the very beginning of the paper.

As far as achieving "communication and organization", probably both?

I̶t̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶u̶r̶c̶h̶,̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶a̶r̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶W̶o̶w̶.̶

Edit -- missionary.lds.org is latter day saints. One of their quotes was by a Jehovah's Witness, so I thought this was a guide for Jehovah's Witnesses. If the question is "Does it work for the specific individuals in the Mormon Church?" the answer is yes.

"hello, world".replace(/(.)/g, '\u0336$1') == "h̶e̶l̶l̶o̶,̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶"

I was poking fun at that.

A is probabilistically true (i.e., in most cases) iff the majority of people are idiots)

Given that people aren't really good idiot oracles, and in particular that if you care about the respect other show you in general then on some level you will also often be bothered by disrespect from idiots, I think A can very well be true even if most people aren't idiots.

in retrospect, that's a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure - it's probably a bad example.

for context:

friendster failed at 100m+ users - that's several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).

there's a selection effect for startups, at least the ones i've seen so far: ones that fail to adequately scale, almost never make it into the public eye. since failing to scale is a very embarrassing bit of information to admit publicly after the fact - the info is unlikely to be publicly known unless the problem gets independently, externally, publicized, for any startup.

i'd expect any startup that makes it past the O(1m active users) point and then proceeds to noticeably be impeded by performance problems to be unusual - maybe they make it there by cleverly pivoting around their scalability problems (or otherwise dancing around them/putting them off), with the hope of buying (or getting bought) out of the problems later on.

"Why are you in the hospital?" - "Because I was injured when a car hit me."

"Why did the car hit you?" - "Because the driver was drunk and I was standing at the intersection."

"Why was the driver drunk?" and "Why were you standing at the intersection?" and so on and so forth.

Every "why" question about something occurring in the natural world is answered by going one (or more) levels down in the granularity, describing one high-level phenomenon via its components, typically lower-level phenomena.

This isn't unlike deriving one corollary from another. You're climbing back* the derivation tree towards the axioms, so to speak. It's the same in any system, the math analogy would be if someone asked you "why does this corollary hold", which you'd answer by tracing it back to the nearest theorem. Then "why does this theorem hold" would be answered by describing its lower-level* lemmata. Back we go, ever towards the axioms.

All these are more aptly described as "how"-questions, "how" is the scientific question, since what we're doing is finding descriptions, not reasons, in some sense.

Of course you could just solve such distinctions via dictionary and then in daily usage use "why" and "how" interchangeably, which is fine. But it's illuminating to notice the underlying logic.

Which leaves as the only truly distinct "why"-question the "why those axioms?", which in the real world is typically phrased as "why anything at all?". Krauss tries to reduce that to a "how" question in A Universe From Nothing, as does the Tegmark multiverse, which doesn't work except snuggling in one more descriptive layer in front of the axioms.

There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense. The territory just provides us with evidence, the model we build to compress that evidence implicitly surmises the existence of underlying axioms in the territory. But why bother with that single remaining "Why"-question when the answer is forever outside our reach?

*(We know real trees are upside down, unlike these strange biological things in that strange place outside our window.)

Maybe rationalization is even neccessary for dealing rationally with real life (the word kind of gives it away).

Only in the sense that lying can be called "truthization".

"Because" (in the original quote) is about causality. Your inequality implies nothing causal without a lot of assumptions. I don't understand what your setup is for increasing belief about a causal link based on an observed correlation (not saying it is impossible, but I think it would be helpful to be precise here).

Jiro's comment is correct but a non-sequitur because he was (correctly) pointing out there is a dependence between success and genius that you can exploit to update. But that is not what the original quote was talking about at all, it was talking about an incorrect, self-serving assignment of a causal link in a complicated situation.

statistical correlation is what Bayes is all about

No, I don't think so at all.

Bayes is about updating your estimates on the basis of new data points. You are not required to be stupid about it.

If everyone is thinking in the same way, you have a good result only if that one way is the correct way. If there are a variety of different ways, all of which appear good, they will produce varying proposals which can be considered for their direct practical consequences, and when the different methods come into conflict, all can be tested and potentially improved.

You might object that you have deduced the correct way of thinking, and therefore you do not need to be concerned with this. Two counter-arguments: 1) You are most likely overconfident, and the consequences of overconfidently removing all other methods of thinking are likely to be a catastrophic Black Swan when an unseen flaw hits you. 2) To the best of our knowledge, the objectively correct way of thinking is AIXI, which is literally unimplementable.

Lack of diversity may be a problem because then you've got a lower chance of getting the right answer somewhere in there.

That, too, but there are other issues as well -- e.g. risk management through diversification.

Otherwise, what could be thought about that doesn't have a correct answer?

Is she pretty?

Should I be a vegetarian?

What's the best way of tackling that problem?

You are invited by a friend to what he calls a "cool organization". You walk into the building, and are promptly greeted by around twenty different people, all using variations on the same welcome phrase. You ask what the main point of the organization is, and several different people chime in at the same time, all answering, "Politics." You ask what kind of politics. Every single one of them proceeds to endorse the idea that abortion is unconditionally bad. Now feeling rather creeped out, you ask them for their reasoning. Several of them give answers, but all of those answers are variations of the same argument, and the way in which they say it gives you the feeling as though they are reciting this argument from memory.

Would you be inclined to stay at this "cool organization" a moment longer than you have to?

In 1 and 2, the thinking is not the type being referred to in the quote.

The quote is without a provenance that I can discover. If authentic, I presume that Patton was referring to military planning. I don't see a line separating that type of thinking from cases (1)-(4) and some of (5). Ideas must be found or created to achieve results that are not totally ordered. Thinking better is helpful but thinking alike is not.

In 3, assuming only one of theirs get chosen, then there are 19 failures, hence 19 non-thinkers or non-sufficient thinking.

Only if you "thinking better" to retroactively mean "won". But that is not what the word "thinking" means.

In 4, they're not all trying to answer the same question "what's the best way to make money", but the question "what's a good way to make money".

I doubt any of those entrepreneurs are indifferent between a given level of success and 10 times that level.

In 5, yes, every test-taker should give the correct answer to every question. Obvious for multiple choice tests, and even other tests usually only have one really correct answer, even if there may be more than one way to phrase it.

Perhaps you are thinking only of a limited type of exam. There is only one correct answer to "what is 23 times 87?"[1] Not all exams are like that.

Philosophy:

Do we need a notion of innateness in order to explain how humans come to know about objects, causes, words, numbers, colours, actions or minds? (Your answer may focus on a single domain of knowledge.)

Ancient history (from here:

"The mother of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, follower of Horus, she who is in charge of the affairs of the Harem, whose every word is done for her, daughter of the god (begotten) of his body, Hetepheres." -- Inscription from the tomb of Hetepheres

With reference to the quotation, discuss the power and influence of queens in this period [of ancient Egypt].

The link also provides the marking criteria for the question. The ideal result can only be described as "twenty students giving the same answer" if, as in case (3), "the same answer" is redefined to mean "anything that gets top marks", in which case it becomes tautological.

In 6, first of all, your example is isomorphic to its complement; where 20 people decide not to lynch an innocent man. If you defend the original quote, then some of them must not be thinking. And the actual answer is that my quoted version is one-sided; agreement doesn't imply idealism, idealism implies agreement.

I reject both of those. Agreement doesn't imply ideal, of course (case 6 was just a test to see if people were thinking). But neither does ideal imply agreement, except by definitional shenanigans. And your version of Patton's quote doesn't include the hypothesis of ideality anyway. Neither does Patton's. We are, or should be, talking about the real world.

I could add a disclaimer; everyone should be thinking alike in cases referred to by the first quote. I don't have a good way to narrow down exactly what that is off-hand right now, it's kind of intuitional. Do you have an example where my claim conflicts directly with what the first quote would say, and you think it's obvious in that scenario that they are right and not me?

What are those cases? Military planning, I am assuming, on the basis of who Patton was. Twenty generals gather to decide how to address the present juncture of a war. All will have ideas; these ideas will not all be the same. They will bring different backgrounds of knowledge and experience to the matter. In that situation, if they all all agree at once on what to do, I believe Patton's version applies.

(1) Ubj znal crbcyr'f svefg gubhtug ba ernqvat gung jnf "nun, urknqrpvzny!" Whfg...qba'g.

I don't see why. Non-agents simply don't fit the definition of "god", so equivocating on the definition of "god" from "world-changingly powerful agent" to "abstract personification of causality itself" does not really shed any light on anything.

I think this is about the only scenario on LW that someone can be justifiably downvoted for that statement.

I up-voted it for dissenting against sloppy thinking disguised as being deep or clever. Twisting the word 'god' to include other things that do fit the original, literal or intended meaning of the term results in useless equivocation.

What are you talking about?

I'm using it to make a related joke.

Trying to overcome biases takes effort. Wasted effort is bad. It's better to pursue mixed strategies that aim at instrumental rationality

I think you are assuming hyperbolic discounting/short time preference. It requires a lot of effort to overcome bias, perhaps years. But there are times when it is worth it.

than to aim at the perfection described in the Rand quotation

What perfection? Choosing philosophy? You can always update your philosophy.

As does Chesterton, less explicitly:

Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.

and at length.

I get the impression that he (thankfully!) eased off on that particular template as time went on.

But it's not obvious that they were more egalitarian when it comes to political power or ability to do violence.

When the most powerful weapon is a mounted knight in full plate mail, its easy for a small minority to dominate. When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick...

We don't know that. It was likely some variant of the name commonly translated as "Joshua" in English. It could have been Yeshua or Yehoshua or a variety of slightly Aramacized variants of that.

For me, it's not just a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem of destroying involvement in the story. If too much bad happens to the characters, I'm less likely to be emotionally invested in them. Martin's "The Princess and the Queen" (a prequel to ASoIaF) in Dangerous Women is especially awful that way, through the characters aren't developed very much, either. I'm hoping he does a better job in the main series.

His reputation as a "bloody minded bastard" aside, Martin has creznaragyl xvyyrq bss n tenaq gbgny bs bar CBI punenpgre va gur ebhtuyl svir gubhfnaq phzhyngvir cntrf bs gur NFbVnS frevrf fb sne (abg pbhagvat cebybthr/rcvybthr punenpgref, jubz ab bar rkcrpgf gb fheivir sbe zber guna bar puncgre). Gur raqvat bs gur zbfg erprag obbx yrnirf bar CBI punenpgre'f sngr hapyrne, ohg gur infg znwbevgl bs gur snaqbz rkcrpgf uvz gb or onpx va fbzr sbez be nabgure. (Aba-CBI graq gb qebc yvxr syvrf, ohg gur nhqvrapr vf yrff nggnpurq gb gurz.)

That's interesting. What criterion/criteria does "Best" use, then?

And on a different but related note: does it really negate the strategy? I note that, despite using the "Best" setting, this page still tends to display higher-karma comments near the top; furthermore, most of those high-karma comments seem to have been posted pretty early in the month. That suggests to me that Gondolinian's strategy may still have a shot.

I'm fully aware that there's more to nautical charts than the water's surface, and I used the term 'satellite photography' somewhat broadly. More of the deep ocean has been mapped by sensors in polar orbits, which can stay on-station indefinitely and cover the entire globe without regard for local obstacles, than ever was (or likely would have been) by surface craft and submarines.

While I agree with the overall sentiment, I think it's important not to overdo this approach. Let me explain.

Consider the situation where you have a stochastic process which generates values -- for example, you're drawing random values from a certain distribution. So you draw a number and let's say it is 17.

On the one hand you did draw 17 -- that number is "real" and the rest of the distribution which didn't get realized is only "imaginary". You should care about that 17 and not about what did not happen.

On the other hand, if we're interested not just in a single sample, but in the whole process and the distribution underlying it, that number 17 is almost irrelevant. We want to understand the entire distribution and that involves parts which did not get realized but had potential to be realized. We care about them because they inform our understanding of what might happen if the process runs again and generates another value.

Similarly, if you treat history as a sequence of one-off events, you should pay attention only to what actually happened and ignore what did not. But if you want to see history as a set of long-term processes which generate many events, you're probably interested in estimating the entire shape of these processes and that includes "invisible" parts which did not actually happen but could have happened.

There are obvious methodological pitfalls here and I would recommend wielding Occam's Razor with abandon, but that should not conceal the underlying epistemic point that what did not happen could be important, too.

Good point.

Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a "good guy"? His opposition to Carthage's destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence.

Well, it did.

Forgive my fulfilling of Godwin's Law, but if a Nazi leader repeatedly told Hitler "Don't kill the Jews because struggling against them in the economic marketplace will make Germans stronger" would you consider this leader a "good guy"?

It's an example of someone speaking out against genocide. The effort ultimately failed, but engaging in political advocacy against mass murder could reasonably be considered efficient altruism?

Exactly, so only people who aren't aborted count as born, in which case the birth rate is 80%.

I wondered myself. Maybe they decided not to risk anything-just in case.

I think that the quote means "petty things like who stepped out of the spaceship first don't matter", not "petty things like the difference between us and those capitalist pigs don't matter".

It's also true that the line between "American" and "Soviet" (or, for that matter, between "American" and "1940s German") is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between "burns others in ovens" and "doesn't": it is mainly indicative of which part of the world you were born in. I have much greater sympathy for moral equivalency in the first case than in the second.

Yes, imagine. (Spoilers for "Worm".)

I find myself confused...: (

at least for values of "real" that don't bake in the conclusion

That was the impression I had. Yes, Rand is making the normative claim that 'accidental' success is not 'real,' and that 'happiness' acquired in ways other than 'honest use of your intelligence' is not 'real,' but those seem like fine normative claims to me.

Primarily, by pretending that a "usually" is an "always". "Real success is never accidental" is, empirically, definitely false. "Real success is almost never accidental" would be the less strong, but more correct, version.

That would depend on what you mean by success now wouldn't it? If you believe people who take calculated risks and get unlucky aren't successful, then perhaps you're right. But you can't claim you can make a statement more correct by assuming you know what every word means. Parsing ambiguity is part of rationality. (Though my downvotes would indicate it's not...)

Better, to Death:

For once, Death appeared not to smile.

He brought his hand down on the strings.

There was no sound.

There was, instead, a cessation of sound, the end of a noise which Susan realized she'd been hearing all along. All the time. All her life. A kind of sound you never notice until it stops . . .

The strings were still.

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

Death played the empty chord.

The beat slowed. And began to weaken. The universe spun on, every atom of it. But soon the whirling would end and the dancers would look around and wonder what to do next.

It's not time for THAT! Play something else!

--Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

Silence can be part of a piece of music (and that's been obvious since long before Cage; that's not the point he was making) but that doesn't mean silence is a musical chord.

Similarly, atheism is an opinion on a question relevant to religion but it isn't a religion.

A musical chord is defined as three or more notes played at the same time. I could see complaining about the definition being wrong if it was one or more notes, or even two or more notes, but when it's three or more notes I think it's clear that it means something more specific than a set of notes.

Even religious people have a concept of "bad religion" -- the religion of their enemies. What they worship is not some abstract concept of religion in general, but one specific religion. Other specific religions are wrong.

Saying "atheism is a religion" is reducing a new enemy to a subtype of the old enemy they already have millenia of experience fighting against. It's not suggesting that atheism is equivalent to e.g. Christianity (something high status), but rather that it is equivalent to Baal worship (something low status).

Right.

And, in particular, I think that when someone says "atheism is a religion" they're (almost?) always saying it for rhetorical effect rather than as a carefully considered statement they'd be prepared to explain the exact meaning of and give justification for. Which means, I think, that it's reasonable to respond in a way optimized for rhetorical effect (e.g., with the sort of comparison HalMorris posted upthread -- I don't really think it's a "rationality quote", but I think it's a perfectly good response to "atheism is just another religion").

If the person who said "atheism is a religion" then follows up with something more carefully considered that isn't refuted by likening atheism to turning the TV off, or being bald, or not playing any notes on the piano, or whatever, that's a good outcome: you've got something actually worth discussing. If they just drop the subject, that's a different kind of good outcome: a silly rhetorical trick has been neutralized by a less silly rhetorical trick. (Less silly because I think the response is more defensible than the original provocation.)

a religion in the sense that it addresses the big questions that our familiar religions do

It addresses one big question that our familiar religions do. The others it leaves alone (beyond rejecting one specific claim that's alleged to answer several of them.) What is the nature of right and wrong? Where do human beings come from? Do we have anything like souls and if so can they survive (or be restored after) death? Is there a purpose to our existence (individually or collectively) and if so what?

There are lots of possible answers to those questions that don't involve gods.

(I think it's probably true that most atheists in present-day Western society have similar answers to most of those questions. If so, I think that indicates not that atheism is really a religion but that there are other things besides atheism pushing us towards those answers. For instance, actual evidence that they're right; or historically contingent groupthink; or other possibilities that will readily occur to the imaginative reader.)

I don't think atheism is a religion, precisely because it does not provide a comprehensive guide to living. However, our form of "rationality" - with its precise reasons for atheism, its specific moral aspirations and justifications therefor, and even its prophecies of the defeat of death and suffering by science - does qualify.

It might be how they would explicitly define a code of morals, but I think they just don't understand why they have morality. When I was still a theist, I wondered why there'd be any reason for an atheist to have morals without the promise of heaven and the threat of hell. I suspect lots of theists ask that. I didn't base my every action on greed for heaven and fear of hell and I doubt many theists do.

Is it? My impression is that most people would consider utilitarianism to be a moral code, even if they thought it a terrible one.

What would you call the Vedas or the Tripitaka, if not sacred scriptures embodying elaborate bodies of doctrine?

You might be right about the hierarchies of authority figures, but since the "Abrahamic" religions account for more than half the religious population of the world I'm not too bothered if one item in my list is specific to those.

It's not only a matter of meet.

It's a matter of those people strongly self identifying as atheist will other people don't care that much about the question.

In the real world I doubt that's true.

That's why I remarked that all universal generalizations are wrong. I bet there are, here and there, a few people whose attitude to Richard Dawkins is similar to a typical Roman Catholic's attitude to the pope. But I'm pretty sure they're rare. "Atheism has a rare failure mode where X happens" is not at all the same proposition as "In atheism, X happens".

an example of practice that's a bit ritualistic.

Oh yes, you reminded me of a category of unreasonable response I failed to mock in my original comment, so let me go ahead and mock it now.

"But atheists admire the writings of people like Russell and Ingersoll, which is like having sacred scriptures! And some of them do significance tests or always check the same things when they get into the car, which is like having rituals! And to be an atheist you have to not believe in a god, which is like having a body of doctrine you have to agree with! And many atheists expect there to be super-advanced aliens, or superintelligent AIs, now or in the future, and that's like believing in supernatural superior beings! Etc., etc., etc.!" Nope. Those similarities are vague enough that if you're willing to accept that sort of thing then everything "is a religion". Software development is a religion: the scriptures are things like Kernighan & Ritchie or Knuth; the sacred places are maybe the Googleplex and (in memory only, now) Bell Labs; there are rituals like checking that all your tests pass before committing code to the version control repository; etc. Business is a religion: the prophets are famously effective businesspeople like Carnegie and Rockefeller in the past or Jobs and Elon Musk more recently; the system of ethics is the principle of always maximizing profits; the authority figures are CEOs; etc. Playing chess is a religion; the scriptures are opening manuals and books of famous games; there are lots of rituals like saying "j'adoube" before touching a piece you aren't moving, and shaking hands with your opponent at the start or end of the game; the rules of chess somewhat resemble an ethical code and a body of doctrine; etc. I could go on for hours but I hope you're bored already.

If a standard of comparison is broad enough to say that every institution or practice is "like a religion", then the fact that it says atheism is like a religion is completely uninteresting.

motte-and-bailey

I'd agree if atheists were, when not being challenged by theists, busily engaged in worshipping the shade of Christopher Hitchens, or insisting that everyone has to read "The God Delusion" once a year, or otherwise behaving in ways that would plausibly count as religious. But I don't see that; I genuinely think such things are really rare. There may be a bailey corresponding to the motte of just-disbelieving-in-gods (I put it that way because I do think the common claim that atheism means only not positively believing in any particular god has a whiff of motte-and-bailey about it, but that's not something I've been arguing for or assuming) but if there is I don't think it has anything to do with atheism being religion-like. (Things that might go in the bailey: the idea that religion is harmful as well as merely factually incorrect on the question of gods; admiration for science and maybe some preference for treating all questions in a broadly scientific manner; secularism.)

Ah. Great PR there, Dawkins.

So now that you've made your argument more explicit, I largely agree, but let me defend Chesterton (and maybe to some extent Azathoth123) just a little. Specifically, I'll argue (1) that his metaphor is a bit more coherent than you give it credit for, (2) that he isn't claiming anything as silly as that the majority is always wrong, and (3) that if he's understood right then what he says isn't as hard to reconcile with the neoreactionaries' claims as you suggest. But I agree (4) that he isn't making any very interesting factual statement, (5) that it doesn't offer all that much support for neoreaction, and (6) that he's engaging in rhetoric rather than anything much like reasoned argument.

Chesterton's argument, so far as there is one, seems to go like this. "Everyone thought traditional Christianity was dying or dead, washed away by a great stream of enlightenment and skepticism and liberalism. Some of its parts might stay in place for a while before eventually being eroded away, but the ultimate outcome seemed in little doubt. But now we see something -- let's call it neocatholicism -- not merely hanging on as the tide rushes past but actually heading in the opposite direction, getting more traditional over time rather than less. This shows that neocatholicism, and by extension traditional Christianity generally, is still alive and kicking. Let us put this in the context of these other times I've described, when Christianity appeared to be dead or dying but then regained ascendancy; this is just another example of the same phenomenon, even though we haven't yet quite reached the bit where the Church triumphs again."

So Chesterton is saying that his Great Thingy is enduring where what presently looks like a great all-consuming stream is in fact ephemeral; give it another century or so, he says, and the Church will still be there stronger than ever while the stream of skeptical enlightenment dwindles and is eventually forgotten. So I don't see the difference you do with the neoreactionaries' view of their model of society.

I don't think the claim here is that the majority is always wrong. Nor that "only a living thing can go against the stream" proved Christianity right or proves neoreaction right. I think it's intended to be something less ambitious: the emergence in Chesterton's time of a Catholic reaction showed (according to Chesterton) that Catholic Christianity was a still-somewhat-vigorous living thing and shouldn't be written off, and the emergence of neoreaction in our time shows (according to Azathoth123, if I'm interpreting him right) that a reactionary view of society is a still-somewhat-vigorous living thing and shouldn't be written off.

(So the actual alleged truth being asserted would be something like this: "Something that goes against the current of popular opinion, not merely holding on but pushing in the opposite direction, must have some vigour to it, and it may turn out to win in the end." Which, like the literal statement about floating bodies, is probably true but not very interesting.)

To support his stronger thesis that traditional Catholic Christianity is (not merely not quite dead yet, but) everlasting and always ultimately triumphant, Chesterton appeals to a bigger historical context in which (so he says) it has repeatedly seemed dead but returned greater and more terrible than ever before. I'm not sure whether the neoreactionaries make a similar claim.

There's still very little here in the way of actual argument, but that's how Chesterton rolls. Some clever and counterintuitive ideas, a paradoxical way of presenting them, lots of rhetorical fireworks and ingenious metaphors, and his work is done. If you get as far as thinking carefully about whether what he says is actually correct then his verbal pyrotechnics obviously weren't impressive enough.

which makes progressivism the stream itself, rather than a dead thing floating down some other stream.

Well progressivism self-identifies as "being on the right side of history".

Maybe Rand is referering to a specific situation where she knows Branden's thought processes and her statements are correct.

It was about arguing with collectivists (AKA people who were sympathetic to the USSR). Whether she was correct about communism being inferior to capitalism isn't easy to analyze objectively but in a sense history has validated her.

In that case, I wouldn't know. But if it's meant generally enough to be a rationality quote - if it's meant to explain why we get angry at dishonest people - then it's just an unsupported claim

It's supported by her personal experience. It is also largely supported by my own personal experience.

And equating dishonesty with both evil AND irrationality rubs me wrong. Rand believed that she's basically solved morality, and rationality only allowed one kind of morality, namely hers

Only partly true. Her morality acknowledges that man has the free will to think, but assumes that if he thinks honestly he'll come to many of the same conclusions that she does. The only real constraint in Objectivist morality is on the initiation of force.

I believe this is part of what locked her into an inescapable worldview, beyond correction and updating

This is an exaggeration.

(like what Branden wrote about how, once she decided that Reason's verdict on hypnosis was that it was bunk and had no foundation in reality, nothing could reach her on the subject)

This puts Rand within the general consensus of American psychologists. Branden also said that Rand updated on the effects of smoking marijuana.

I think it more useful to consider rationality (correct reading of reality and decision making) separately from values held.

Why? What if you notice patterns in values held and rationality? Should you ignore them?