The very concept of a "rationalist" is an egregious one! What is a rationalist, really? The motte: "one who studies the methods of rationality, systematic methods of thought that result in true beliefs and goal achievement". The bailey: "a member of the social ingroup of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander fans, and their friends."
Yeah, this already bothered me some, but your way of putting it here makes it bother me more.
I think the motte/bailey often runs in the other direction, though, for modesty-ish reasons: there's a temptation to redefine 'rationalist' as a social concept, because it looks more humble to say 'I'm in social circle X' than to say 'I'm part of important project X' or 'I'm a specialist in X', when you aren't doing X-stuff as part of a mainstream authority like academia.
I think there are two concepts I tend to want labels for, which I sometimes use 'rationalist' to refer to (though I hope I'm not switching between these in a deceptive/manipulative way!):
I think the latter...
It doesn't help when Yudkowsky actively encourages this confusion! As he Tweeted today: "Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet."
Just—the absolute gall of that motherfucker! I still need to finish my memoir about why I don't trust him the way I used to, but it's just so emotionally hard—like a lifelong devout Catholic denouncing the Pope. But what can you do when the Pope is actually wrong? My loyalty is to the truth, not to him.
This doesn't seem to be about the term rationalist at all. It seems to be about which rhetorical style different people prefer. Eliezer makes in a much more confident and more polarizing way then Scott.
I made a similar, but slightly different argument in Pseudo-Rationality:
"Pseudo-rationality is the social performance of rationality, as opposed to actual rationality."
I've been Rationalist-adjacent for over 10 years now by my ideals, but have never taken part in the community (until this post, hello!) precisely because I find this fallacy throughout a lot of Rationalist discourse and it has put me off.
The motte: "Here is some verifiable data that suggests my hypothesis. It is incomplete, and I may be wrong. I am but a humble thinker, calling out into the darkness, looking for a few pinpricks of truth's light."
The bailey: "The limitations in my data and argument are small enough that I can confidently make a complex conclusion at the end, to some confidence interval. Prove my studies wrong if you disagree. If you respond to my argument with any kind of detectable emotion I will take this as a sign of your own irrationality and personal failings."
In my reading the bailey tends to come out in a few similar Rationalist argument styles. What they all have in common is that some lip service is usually paid to the limitations of the argument, but the poster still goes on as if their overall argument is probable and valid, instead of a fundamentally unsupported post-hoc rationalization built on sand. I tend to see:
Obviously this comment is critical, but I do mean this with good humor and I hope it is taken as such. The pursuit of truth is an ideal I hold important.
(An aside: the characterization of post-modern argument in the OP is only accurate in the most extreme and easily parodied of post-modernist thinkers. Most post-modernists would argue that social constructs are subjective narratives told on top of an objective world, and that many more things are socially constructed than most people believe. That the hypothetical about the sun is used as an example of bad post-modernist thought, instead of any of the actual arguments post-modernists make in real life, is a bit of a tip-off that it's not engaging with a steel man.)
...An aside: the characterization of post-modern argument in the OP is only accurate in the most extreme and easily parodied of post-modernist thinkers. Most post-modernists would argue that social constructs are subjective narratives told on top of an objective world, and that many more things are socially constructed than most people believe. That the hypothetical about the sun is used as an example of bad post-modernist thought, instead of any of the actual arguments post-modernists make in real life, is a bit of a tip-off that it's not engaging with a ste
It would be more honest and objective for the argument to stop at the very first doubtful point and leave it there with a CI for future discussion.
This seems fine until you have to make actual decisions under uncertainty. Most decisions have multiple uncertain factors going into them, and I think it's genuinely useful to try to quantify your uncertainty in such cases (even if it's very rough, and you feel the need to re-run the analysis in several different ways to check how robust it is, etc.).
What would you propose doing in such cases? I'd be interested ...
Yeah, it isn't really engaging with a steelman. But then again, the purpose of the passage is to explain a very common dynamic that occurs in post-modernism. And I guess it'd be hard, considering a similar situation, to explain a dynamic that sometimes makes government act dysfunctional, whilst also steelmanning that.
Although I don't think its accurate to say that its not representative of what post-modernists really argue - maybe it doesn't accurately represent what philosophers argue - but it seems to fairly accurately represent what everyday people who ...
I think there's a tendency to assume the rationalist community has all the answers (e.g. The Correct Contrarian Cluster), which seems (a) wrong to me on the object-level, but also (b) at odds with a lot of other rationalist ideas.
If you point this out, you might hear someone say they're "only an aspiring rationalist", or "that's in the sequences", or "rationalists already believe that". Which can seem like a Motte and Bailey, if it doesn't actually dent their self-confidence at all.
(b) at odds with a lot of other rationalist ideas.
The great strength of Rationalism...yes, I'm saying something positive. .is that it's flaws can almost always be explained using concepts from its own toolkit.
I'm not sure what you mean by "has all the answers". I could imagine a rationalist thinking they're n standard deviations above the average college-educated human on some measure of 'has accurate beliefs about difficult topics', and you disagreeing and think they're average, or thinking their advantage is smaller. But that just seems like an ordinary disagreement to me, rather than a motte-and-bailey.
It seems at odds with rationalist ideas to assume you're unusually knowledgeable, but not to conclude you're unusually knowledgeable. 'I'm average' is just as...
If rationalists think they're right n% of the time and they're not, then that's condemnable in its own right, regardless of whether there's a motte-and-bailey involved.
If rationalists think they're right n% of the time and they are right n% of the time, but you aren't allowed to be honest about that kind of thing while also being humble, the so much the worse for humility. There are good forms of humility, but the form of 'humility' that's about lying or deceiving yourself about your competence level is straightforwardly bad.
Regardless, I don't think there's any inconsistency with being an 'aspiring rationalist'. Even if you're the most rational human alive, you probably still have enormous room to improve. Humans just aren't that good at reasoning and decision-making yet.
Bayes!
The Bailey is that Bayes is just maths, and you therefore can't disagree with it.
When it is in inevitably pointed out that self described Bayesians don't use explicit maths that much, then they fall back to the Motte .. Bayes is actually just a bunch of heuristics for probabilistic reasoning.
I think there's a common Motte and Bailey with religion
Motte: Christianity and other religions in general are almost certainly untrue. Adherents to religions have killed many people worldwide. The modern world would be better if more religious followers learned rationality and became atheists.
Bailey: The development and continued existence of religion has on the whole been a massive net negative for humanity and we would be better off if the religions never existed and people were always atheists.
I don't even think the bailey is outright stated that often by smart rationalist as much as it is sometimes implied and only stated outright by zealous, less-smart atheists. The zealous atheists are likely succumbing to the affect heuristic and automatically refute the assertion that religion may have been a net positive historically even if it is no longer worthwhile. But they most often defend the claim that religion was terrible for humanity by citing to the Motte.
Bailey: "Religion is harmful and untrue."
Motte: "Christianity and Islam (and occasionally Orthodox Judaism) are harmful and untrue."
I feel like both sides of the "White Fragility" debate have some of this going on.
I don't feel like I've exactly seen rationalists on these sides (in large part because the discussion generally hasn't been very prominent), but I've seen lots of related people on both sides, and I expect rationalists to have similar beliefs to those people. (Myself included)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pqa7s3m9CZ98FgmGT/i-read-white-fragility-so-you-don-t-have-to-but-maybe-you?commentId=wEuAmC2kYWsCg4Qsr
Motte and Bailey is a concept by Nicholas Shackel that Scott Alexander has popularised. He describes this as follows:
The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
Sometimes Motte and Baileys arguments are the result of bad faith, but I suspect in many cases that those making them have no idea that they are engaging in such a strategy. In fact, it seems highly likely that one or more Motte and Baileys would be popular among rationalists. What are the most common such Motte and Baileys?