Some people are complaining that #Rationality is turning into a new progressive religion.

There is an element of truth to this, but it's also badly wrong.

Let me start with the incorrect part: cognitive biases, expected utility and Bayes' Theorem are not a religion.

You can try to make a religion out of them, but these things are so neutral that you will need to add a lot of other stuff, because the toolbox of rationality serves almost every possible goal system (and therefore cannot be used to define a goal system or a social order).

So why is there an aspect of truth to it?

Ah, well, ....

From a recent co-housing advert:

"In our home, our inner sanctum, we want a place where things make sense, science rules"

"Optimal rational agents"

"The house probably wouldn't suit you if you believe in ... superstitions, astrology, tarot, most conspiracies, ... religion."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that I don't want to live with an optimal rational agent.

This is religion-ization of rationality that I spotted in the wild, and I am sure that there is plenty more of it out there if you care to look.

When people religionize rationality, the result is bad, broken rationality.

Why?

Because actual rationality doesn't contain the content you need to make a religion. Religion needs things that bind people together, and truth is extremely bad for that.

The truth doesn't bind people. You need things that are either false or parochial to bind people.

Given the choice between falsehood and parochialism, choose parochialism. Secular Judaism does a pretty good job of this I think. Heavy on parochial things, light on falsehoods.

Because many converts to "Bay Area Rationalism" are quite atomized/misfits, there isn't any parochial/unique content, so the only option is falsehood and folly.

Of course all unique traditions started off as someone's new folly, but then it got filtered by time.

What do we mean by a nascent tradition getting filtered by time?

We mean that most of this shit will be a horror show and get weeded out when irrationality meets reality:

Now just to disclaim, Queen Bee and the Soylent Four shown above have nothing to do with Rationality or the Bay Area. It's just a particularly clean illustration of how naive optimization of human life can go wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_effect#Background

"In evolutionary psychology, the Cinderella effect is the phenomenon of higher incidences of different forms of child abuse and mistreatment by stepparents than by biological parents."