Today in Alex's ill-informed opinions

[kaberett]

I have very little patience for a lot of what crosses my radar as Movement Rationalism. This is primarily because an enormous amount of it seems completely invested in, well, behaving as though humans can meaningfully and en masse be rational actors, in ways that ignore enormous amounts of evidence about How People Actually Work, with a whole bunch of ditching pragmatics in favour of ideological purity. (This shows up A Lot in Movement Atheism specifically, the adherents of which seem very keen to denigrate religion and organised religion without any actual understanding or appreciation for the psychological and sociological role played by religion even if you are starting from a point of No Supernatural Anything.)

I also find massively off-putting the idea that seems to be taken as axiomatic that Humans Are A Good Thing and it is Objectively Important to Keep The Species Going.

The problem being, of course, that I am simultaneously interested in understanding where people are coming from (and in particular having had this entire thing framed as Rational makes me go "... but? you seem to be leaving? a lot of important information? out of your modelling? because... you don't like it?") and... deeply impatient with most of the places I come across it, so: I would be interested in your views and indeed your recommendations on the approximate topic.

Comments

[lebannen]

I also find massively off-putting the idea that seems to be taken as axiomatic that Humans Are A Good Thing and it is Objectively Important to Keep The Species Going.

(I am also approaching this subject from a point of interest in 'but whyyy do people think that they are making sense?' (see also: economics, maybe I've only ever encountered it at a very superficial level but every system of belief appears to rely on a model of universal rationality) and also a point of 'but what's so great about people anyway?).

Is it just me or do Rationalists (especially the sort likely to be Movement Atheists?) tend to have a fairly high proportion of the sort of bloke who spends a lot of time wondering why women won't sleep with him, and feels that it would be rational for them to do so in order to Keep The Species Going, specifically the part of the species containing his superior and Rational genes? I mean that leads to a lot of circular logic, but you've already got the evidence of human tendencies to non-rational/differently rational behaviours being kicked out of the model, so why not?