415

LESSWRONG
LW

414
Personal Blog

12

Public rationality

by NancyLebovitz
30th Nov 2010
1 min read
13

12

Personal Blog

12

Public rationality
16Alexandros
7AngryParsley
7Leonhart
3JGWeissman
2James_Miller
1Sniffnoy
0FAWS
0AngryParsley
0NancyLebovitz
0InquilineKea
3[anonymous]
0InquilineKea
0[anonymous]
New Comment
13 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:21 AM
[-]Alexandros15y160

Paul Graham is very well regarded for his essays and his work on setting up Hacker News and YCombinator, which he runs as scientific experiments.

Reply
[-]AngryParsley15y70

Bruce Schneier seems pretty rational. I was recently reminded of this fact when he mentioned how his position on software monocultures has changed.

It's refreshing when an expert says, "Whoops! I was wrong and here's why."

Reply
[-]Leonhart15y70

I recall being very surprised by the level of, if not rationality, then at least luminosity and bias-awareness in at least one book by the stage magician Derren Brown. He struck me as being at or above Dawkins' level, with greater communication skills. He'd make an excellent fifth horseman if he chose.

Reply
[-]JGWeissman15y30

Eric Lippert discusses mostly computer programming topics in a manner that demonstrates clear thinking. In particular, this post, (which references Car Talk) could have been a Less Wrong article.

Reply
[-]James_Miller15y20

Dilbert creator Scott Adams. His rationality comes across more in his blog than cartoons.

Reply
[-]Sniffnoy15y10

I'm pretty sure that first link is wrong?

Reply
[-]FAWS15y00

The link is apparently correct (I found an article of theirs within 5 seconds), it's just horribly badly organized (no subsection making for a better place to link to I could find).

Reply
[-]AngryParsley15y00

I think http://www.cartalk.com/ would be a better link.

Reply
[-]NancyLebovitz15y00

Thanks-- link corrected.

But aren't there any other people who engage in rationality in public?

Reply
[-]InquilineKea15y00

This guy is literally a genius.

Reihan Salam also seems to be surprisingly rational (something I'd be very skeptical about from writers who purport as conservatives, although Razib Khan also calls himself conservative), although I haven't read too much of his writing yet.

But if you're a conservative who's surrounded by liberals, then the circumstances often literally force you to be rational (because liberals will only respect your arguments if you're rational). Conservatives may be less tolerant (on average) than liberals, but conservatives who have always been surrounded by liberals can be surprisingly tolerant.

Reply
[-][anonymous]15y30

Hey! We were internet-friends for a while. Matt is really awesome.

In my experience, people who have minority beliefs do tend to be more tolerant. They're definitely more mature about disagreement because they're more used to being disagreed with.

Reply
[-]InquilineKea15y00

Wow, very interesting. :) Where did you meet Matt? I often liked his very creatively intelligent posts at the College Confidential forum.

Reply
[-][anonymous]15y00

I used to write an econ blog; we found each other through links and corresponded some.

Reply
Moderation Log
More from NancyLebovitz
View more
Curated and popular this week
13Comments

I'm going to list some moderately well-known people who strike me as unusually rational. They aren't "rationalists" in the sense that they don't generally explicitly talk about rationality.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi run a web site and talk radio show about car repair. They have a repetitious sense of humor, but if you look past that, you see that they have a very wide body of knowledge (and sometime, we should talk about how much detailed knowledge is worth acquiring so that you have something to be rational with), publicly display the process of testing hypotheses, and get in touch with people they've given advice to later to find out whether the advice worked. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

Ta Nehisi Coates writes a politics and culture blog for The Atlantic. He's notable for trying to see how everyone is doing what makes sense to them-- rather a difficult thing when you're taking on the mind-killer subjects.

Atul Gawande writes books and articles about the practice of medicine. It was particularly striking in his recent The Checklist Manifesto that when his checklists seemed to produce notable improvements in surgical outcomes, his first reaction was concern that there was something wrong with the experiment rather than delight that he'd been proven correct.

Any other recommendations?