This is a prelude of sorts to the essay Entwined.
The Scripture of the Pseudo-Expert, the Weapon of the Bureaucrat
Rationalism is losing because once you come to terms with the human condition and the indomitable nature of complex adaptive systems, you realize how irrational "rationalism" is.
The left curve understands this on religious grounds, recognizing complex systems as under the domain of God. The right curve knows that a forest of emergent phenomena is beyond their abilities, recognizing complex systems as under the domain of nature.
The middle curve opens their Excel sheet, says ‘peer reviewed’ a couple times, and makes false claims about managing the Complex; they believe it’s under the domain of man.
The midcurved approach is often appropriate — man does have agency in many fields he sets out to conquer — but it does not apply to the Complex. Whereas the midwit is unaware of his limits, the left and right curve understand theirs, but conceptualize it differently.
The left and right curve instinctively perceive pseudoscientific promises as authoritative sleight of hand: a cudgel for an elite few to ‘rationalize’ why they know better and should dictate what’s best for you and society. Interestingly, these big-brain ‘logical’ observations invariably conclude that a government or corporation should have more power and jurisdiction over your existence. Curious! Why does it never result in less? It must be because more regulations, more rules, and more bureaucrats are simply the product of sound ‘science’!
Rationalists consistently come to the same conclusions as a government employee or left-leaning politician, but with more mental backflips to get there.
Rationalism pretends to predict the unpredictable and manage the unmanageable. It provides a soothing, misguided sense of command over natural systems and emergent phenomena. It's readily weaponized by those who seek to reign over others, justifying their ever-expanding purview under the fiction they can govern a complex adaptive system. A Complex realm cannot be controlled or mastered by a human mind.
We can't even predict what interest rates will be six months from now (and humans solely influence this!), yet you have a model for the weather five years from now? You are either a moron or a liar, I hope it's the former.
That you even tried to model such a patently un-modelable thing is predicated on rationalism, seasoned with overwhelming arrogance. For climate proclamations specifically: you have taken a human collective-action question, rife with tradeoffs and value judgements, and lied by ascribing it fake objectivity with a ‘science says the right answer is X’ stance. Science is inapplicable to this question.
Should Bangladesh prioritize reducing emissions or building seawalls? Should Germany shutter its nuclear power and accept higher energy costs? Should developing nations remain poor to satisfy Western emission targets? These are moral and economic questions with winners and losers, not laboratory experiments with objectively correct answers. But rationalists enjoy flattening the human multidimensional into a single metric, declare victory through selective framing, and brand anyone who questions it an illogical Science Disliker. This is manipulation.
Rationalism can help us work toward a goal, but it cannot determine what the goal itself should be.
A collective-action problem is an inherently political question. It’s a values-based dialogue, not a scientific one. A rationalist has next to no ability to discern this difference. For them, all tradeoffs and value expressions can be distilled to an expected-value-esque line of thought.
Because they’re made so thoroughly uncomfortable by subjective moral dilemmas, they’ve outsourced all ethics to Excel: hiding behind calculations to advance what are moral opinions all the same.
They inject faux-expertise to shut down instinctive dissent and advance personal motivations wearing ‘The Science’ drag. Opinions camouflaged as an equation, as if sprinkling in some numbers magically bestows veracity upon a political belief. Accordingly, they’ll now inform you what the ‘right’ political outcomes and tradeoffs are for you and society.
Rationalists are best understood as secular-seeming priests with a God complex. Instead of a Bible, they’re equipped with a model, spreadsheet, and woefully inadequate comprehension of the multifaceted.
Feedback Mechanisms
If someone thinks he can fly, he's immediately informed he cannot. Splat.
When the rationalist thinks he can presciently navigate emergent phenomena and impose his will on the Complex, the feedback mechanisms are too long and attribution too vague to emphatically illustrate he’s intellectually splatting all over the place. Unlike the immediate consequences of physical laws, the interplay of social and economic systems allows failed predictions to fade into obscurity while new, equally dubious forecasts take their place.
This non-definitive attribution lets them hide behind unfalsifiability, never shown to be definitively right or wrong: the rationalist sweet spot. But they fall flat on their face all the same, lecturing you the entire way with smug, self-assured confidence.
Be cognizant of unfalsifiable claims wrapped in academic packaging. Approach anything that exists in falsifiability purgatory with extreme skepticism.
It’s perpetuated by people who don't grasp the boundaries of human cognition: intellectual vainglory masquerading as a logic exercise. Rationalism is fundamentally a false promise against the management of the Emergent, similar to how ‘GDP go up forever’ economics is a false promise against scarcity.
Be wary of those who consistently conclude another regulation is needed and more centralized power is necessary. Their motivated reasoning will be adorned with scholarly scaffolding, alleging a ‘study’ deems it essential. People love smuggling in their morality and value judgements under a thinly veiled disguise of pseudo-objectivity.
To its credit, rationalism is mostly fine when not applied to Complex realms. It does have its place, but unfortunately its advocates don’t know theirs. They cannot distinguish between the Complex and the Linear and treat their governance as one and the same.
Engineering a bridge? Model away. Optimizing a supply chain with known variables? Have at it. The Complex and the Linear are distinguished by systems with tight, knowable feedback loops vs those with emergent, entwined layers. Rationalism thinks the same toolkit applies to designing a highway as it does restructuring national housing policy; one works, the other is a bureaucratic catastrophe.
For immensely multifaceted fields like climate, economics, and anything with Nth-order effects, rationalism is shit. Some things cannot be modeled. We simply form narratives that feel roughly right, then append some numbers to post-hoc justify our desired outcomes.
AGI safetyism particularly exemplifies the genre: attempting to forecast the behavior and risks of a nonexistent intelligence that would, by definition, surpass human comprehension! They’re trying to childproof a house for a being that hasn’t been conceived yet, using models built by the very cognitive architecture they claim will be obsolete.
“More fiction has been written in Excel than Word.”
Perhaps equipped with an AGI Monte Carlo pattern god, applied rationalism becomes possible for the Complex. However, it's The Machine doing the thinking, not you. A human mind is computationally incapable of accomplishing this. Know your limits.
The only path forward requires building something that exceeds us entirely, and until we summon a computer species powerful enough to calculate how nature thinks, rationalism is more appropriately understood as arrogant manipulation to shepherd in political stances. Many rationalists naively mean well, but the road to hell is always paved with good intentions.
This is the source of my antipathy. This is what inspires the tone of this essay: fools and wannabe despots spreading pseudointellectual subterfuge, with a self-anointed elite leveraging deceitful assertions to justify tyrannical overreach into our lives.
It's a noble endeavor to learn more about the world and our place within it. I recognize that human knowledge will always be imperfect, and pursuing information should be encouraged and praised. But the issue I have that just won't go away... is how often rationalists leverage their deeply flawed, hubristic models to advance dominion over our lives.
Learning more about the world is great. Abusing it to rule over others is not.
And please spare me any limp ‘anti-science/anti-intellectual’ line that elides the issues here. Emphasis on the empirical and rejection of central command isn’t ‘anti-science’, because what you’re doing isn’t science to begin with. If it's not reproducible nor has predictive ability, it isn't science.
This is a repudiation of an authoritarian tool.
Tyranny, advancing its interests under the banner of pseudoscience, is a tactic all should be acutely aware of after the Covid events of the last four years. ‘Six feet apart’ sacred geometry despite no empirical foundation. ‘Two weeks to flatten the curve’ became two years of state emergency powers. Each arbitrary decree wrapped in ‘follow the science’ rhetoric, which really meant follow the models, which meant follow the modelers, which meant follow the political incentives of those funding the modelers.
That's why rationalism is losing. And God/nature willing, it will continue to.
Defeating Nature
Just as a priest claims to speak to God, a rationalist claims to speak to nature. They won’t say they do, but it’s what they’re unwittingly asserting when they proclaim they can predict her; it means they believe they can control her.
Secular religions (often known as cults) are the opiate of a certain kind of masses. They’re for those who are gifted for a human but still don’t register how woefully incapable that renders them when navigating the Complex.
You are but a man. Even a 200 IQ leaves you painfully deficient to manage something vastly more intricate than you could ever understand. You lack the synapses and raw compute power to forecast what you wish you could. You do not understand the limits placed on you by nature in your pursuit to domesticate her. You are but a man. It makes you uncomfortable to confront this; you're not at peace with your neural finitude. So you deceive yourself and others with your egotistic assertions against nature, claiming you can defeat her.
To defeat her is to master her.
To master her is to control her.
To control her is to predict her.
If you can be predicted, you can be controlled, and defeated.
To believe you can predict nature is to think you can defeat her.
The hubris of these beliefs is suffocating. You have enough neurons to ask "why?", not nearly enough to answer the question, but just enough to delude yourself you can.
Rationalist deities are often supernatural ideals, not spirits. Their tales are rooted in religious metaphors with scientific-sounding veneers.
Eschatology
Religion: Jesus returns, the Rapture
Rationalist: The Singularity
Genesis stories
Religion: Creation theory, man made by God
Rationalist: Simulation theory, man made by advanced civilization
God-shaped holes are always filled. Worshiping nothing just means you worship nothingness. Nihilism becomes your Mother Mary when you think you can defeat nature.
Footnote:
While this essay was in my drafts being worked on, I went to Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and serendipitously encountered exhibits on the romantic era. It fees like we’ve seen this story before…
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The first draft of this essay was published on Twitter and can be found here.
The problem with Rational Materialists is that the thing they claim they are seeking: knowledge, truth, transcend both reason and our material world. Yet they insist on searching within both.
For example, logic can't prove that logic is an accurate tool. It's also not instantiated in our material world. And yet we use this tool with the absolute assumption that it's unerring. So much so that the foundations of math and science assume it works perfectly to carry out reasoning in those respective fields. But where did logic come from, and how can we be so sure it's an airtight tool for discerning truth? No one knows, and yet our most noble goal (truth) requires its accurate use.
Amazing stuff — I have had much of the same criticisms of the rationalist paradigm. Check out this piece that I wrote when you have a chance, I think there’s a lot of overlapping ideas here : https://open.substack.com/pub/brackishwatersbarrensoil/p/there-is-a-god-and-his-name-is-trade