What's So Bad About Rationalism?

Reason and logic alone are not adequate for understanding reality.

Hello and Welcome to your Dark Markets weekend read. This is a rough draft of an important section of my Sam Bankman-Fried book, “The Boy Who Wasn’t There.” Keep that “rough” part in mind - this is a work in progress. That’s the main reason these posts are partially paywalled, though quite a bit of this one is available to all readers.

One quick reminder: be sure to check out my new podcast episode discussing FTX and Tether with the Crypto Critics, Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin.

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Throughout this text, you will read many references to “Rationalism.” This is easily confused with the very similar word rationality - and that’s exactly how the Rationalists get you.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Naked King of Reason.

In very broad strokes, Rationalism is the belief that pure logic, reasoning, and mathematics can, given present knowledge and tools, produce objectively “correct” solutions to all of humanity’s problems, not just in the present, but into the future. This requires an intense and more importantly singular faith in the scientific process; in the base physical predictability of the universe; and, in the end, in the Rationalist’s own incredible gifts of logic.

Rationality, by contrast, is not an ethos or set of beliefs. Rather, it’s one tool among many for understanding the world, and it’s a permanent feature of human existence - the Enlightenment privileged deductive reasoning, but it didn’t invent it.

Rationalism, though, makes rationality the only meaningful rubric for grasping reality, dispensing with (often useful) modes of knowledge including tradition, intuition, and emotion. The irony is that science has proven that intuition and emotion in particular are actually central and vital parts of how living human beings make decisions. It is not a coincidence that Rationalism is rooted in Silicon Valley and heavily concerned with AI. It is a mathematized and instrumental view of the world-as-computer - and more importantly, of human beings as computers.

Ultimately, this dismissal of human and social complexity is why Rationalism fails, and why it has produced such damaging, stupid, and embarrassing results for its many proponents.

It is also why ideas rooted in Rationalism so often tend towards fascism, or the denial of difference. As an ideology, orientation, and living community, Rationalism is the underpinning, both socially and in the substance of its ideas, to other extremely reductive, naive, and covertly violent belief systems, starting with Effective Altruism, but also including Longtermism, belief in the AI “singularity,” and ultimately, race science and eugenics.

Longtermists and EAs will, with nearly pathological regularity, remind anyone who asks that sometimes “sacrifices must be made” in the present, in order to improve the future. This process of excusing present harms in service to a glorious future is how violence sneaks into such a superficially benign idea as the assumption that the world is predictable and “rational.”

Because when a eugenicist or a longtermist asks for extreme sacrifices or specific harms to human beings in the present, they must argue that they can confidently predict the long-term benefits of that sacrifice or harm. This is where Rationalism, with its total belief in a predictable and reducible universe, feeds into the dangerous edge of the Silicon Valley ideology.

This is also, to make some second-order connections, why those who believe artificial intelligence is a threat to human life (“AI Doomers”) are able to argue that funding “AI Alignment” is more important than feeding the hungry or preventing disease in the present. It supports the instrumentalization of other humans that allowed Sam Bankman-Fried to effectively steal $8 billion dollars and leverage it in an attempt to singlehandedly subvert Democracy.

What Else than Reason?

Many, many people are likely to consider these arguments and immediately dismiss them, because they mistake rationalism for rationality. That same mistake, in fact, is a major part of what makes rationalism and the Rationalists so seductive and dangerous, particularly for a certain set of Silicon Valley wunderkinder.

What, you are likely to ask, is the alternative to “rationalism?” Has science not saved millions, maybe billions of lives? Is not the rational process of science the backbone of the wondrous increase in the quality and length of human life over the centuries since the Enlightenment began to push away the shadows of myth and cant?

Sufficiently nuanced expressions of the human experience must ultimately find shape in art or music, or even in simply pure being, none of which even exist as analytical categories within a purely Rationalist conception of time and the universe.

But rejecting rationalism and the Rationalists does not in any way involve a rejection of rationality, as the considered process of weighing evidence and drawing conclusions from it.

Instead, it is the Rationalists who are rejecting any alternative ways of knowing or being that make up what it means to be human. They are rejecting anything but a very narrow set of tools, while explicitly pushing away tools including tradition, intuition, and emotion. For all of rationality’s blessings, these have also been pretty useful throughout human history.

I want to make clear that I’m not about to start doing land acknowledgments - the argument here isn’t that “The West has forgotten traditional ways of knowing and should return to it tribal whatever.” That argument is stupid in its own way.

Rather, my point is that all human societies ever have operated on some mix of all of these ways of knowing. There was plenty of intuition and emotion involved in the project of the founding of the United States, the emblematic polity of Enlightenment. Though the rationalists wouldn’t claim it, the French Revolution was a rather passionate bid for a rational society - the kind of contradiction that the Rationalists would be more likely to dismiss as “suboptimal” than to actually reckon with as a manifestation of something deeply true about the human species-being.