Take of the day:

Keeping an updated, publicized running list of your mistakes and how you fixed them (think SSC) is meant to signal disinterest/rationality. It's always almost entirely for optics, and I'm inclined to think WORSE of someone when I see that they do this

I have a complicated relationship with the EA project because I disagree with (and pretty much ONLY with) their fundamental premise that reason and rationality are intrinsically good

This is the case in point. Publishing an annotated list of mistakes is posting a billboard blaring out "I'm reasonable; I'm emotionally detached; I have hacked my source code and improved myself!"

As I said in another comment, I feel very differently about bureaucracies like GiveWell doing this because the importance of transparency for corruptible institutions outweighs the fact that I think it's preening to keep a running list of how you've grown as an organization

Individuals who do this also claim it's about accountability. But that makes no sense. Acknowledging a mistake doesn't require nailing the 95 Mistakes Thesis to your own church door. Compiling a list of mistakes for a concerned reader is at best convenient, not VIRTUOUS.

I too have made many mistakes. When asked, I will try to be honest about them. But I am fundamentally aesthetically and emotionally oriented; I swoon at rhetoric and demagogy; I follow sensibilities rather than sense.

I don't hate signaling--everything's signaling. I'm just not IMPRESSED by the signal "I can dispassionately self-evaluate." I don't think that's GOOD. I don't care that you can hack your source code. Honestly it creeps me out.

Honest reflection and betterment of the individual is not supposed to be done by the individual himself. This is why we have COMMUNITIES. They're supposed to help you evaluate yourself. We had a perfectly good appendage for this, and now people are just throwing it away.

I'll take a rather extreme stance here: If you are able to step away from emotion, dispassionately self-evaluate, and report your findings without pride or shame, that does NOT speak well of you.

The same stands if you're able to do this for your friends and family. You should be able to do it better for your neighbors, and pretty well for your acquaintances.

The irony is that Scott, who I'm most openly criticizing in this thread, had the objectively correct take about this in that ingroup/outgroup post of his.

I will sweat blood if asked to criticize my closest people. It's like looking at an optical illusion, or staring at the sun so hard it burns incendiary little circles into your field of vision. My knee-jerk impulse toward them (and toward myself) is to defend.

To be constantly holistically evaluating my friends and family certainly wouldn't be unconditional love. It also wouldn't be loyalty! You can only express the virtue of loyalty by being tested. (Scott gets this correct, too, although he discusses forgiveness rather than loyalty.)

But rationality asks us to do these things. The mere ask to always update on new information is not harmless. When combined with a knowledge/action link and a hatred of inconsistency, it's really loaded. Now I can't take a "disinterested" stance about others' doings.

Let's say I always loan money to X and he never pays me back. It's charitable for me to keep giving him money knowing he won't repay it. And rationalism allows me to do this if I write off the money as lost--there's no cognitive dissonance going on here.

But there's a different, equally sweet virtue in truly BELIEVING X will pay me back my loan even though he never has before. Rationalism runs roughshod over the existence of this virtue, of absolutely ill-advised forgiveness, of giving out infinite chances as Christ would.

The benefit of the doubt is an incredibly underrated, magnanimous gesture--especially when it's totally undeserved.

Under rationalism I can't stand by my people come hell or high water, and I can't believe the best of the other when it's logically a bad bet. This is why I think "rationality" as presently conceived-of is absolutely incompatible with any real notion of loyalty or honor.

So, the upshots...

I've been following this community for probably ten years. It has taken me ten years to put my finger on what I find so confusing about Scott Alexander & co.--even though it's actually a very simple thing.

What confuses me is that their sensibilities are VERY MUCH like mine. They're an intentional community. They evangelize, yes, but they also consider themselves to be doing a BenOp/city-on-a-hill kind of deal. They won't turn on each other (both out of principle and out of love).

They're aesthetically inclined. (There's no denying Bostrom has a cult of personality around him.) And, in being futurists, they have this forward-looking ethos that's not so different from the Abrahamic outlook toward the Judgment Day.

They prize loyalty and honor, though they have different definitions of those terms than I do. And they view the ability to face their mistakes as a show of courage and strength.

All this--yet they come to radically different conclusions about first-order action steps than I do.

Maybe I was wrong to be so harsh about the mistake-list thing? It does seem, upon reflection, to be bathed in an honor ethos. (I don't think about these threads before writing them. I just spitball.)

I think the rationalist community is probably the most fascinating academy-adjacent anthropological phenomenon since the Vienna Circle. And the reason I think that is that they pair sensibilities that seem very classical with action steps that seem anti-classical.