Rationalism Is Dumb and Wrong
"You don’t believe it because it's rational. You believe it because no one's found a way to profit off deconstructing it."
It is not an accident that the gap between the development of consciousness and The Enlightenment are separated by hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of years.
This order of operations occurred because rationality only works when most of the territory has already been mapped.
Afford me an analogy to explain:
Imagine you are a buyer of widgets. You previously had X widgets in inventory, and just bought Y more widgets, and you’d like to know Z, how many widgets you presently have. A calculator, all the cool kids would agree, is a fantastic tool for the job. If you input the value of X and add it to the value of Y, the calculator will tell you Z with absolute perfect precision every single time.
But what if you don’t know X? or maybe Y? Hell, what if you don’t know either? Or at least you can’t verify them? Without knowing two-thirds of the relevant parameters for sure, your super great, logically precise computation machine might as well be a random number generator.
“Reason and evidence” (or, if you want to get autistic about it, Bayesian Inference) is the calculator. Existing knowledge X and new evidence Y can be factored together to find Z new knowledge.1 But your calculator is more useless than the 19th Amendment if X and Y aren’t at least somewhere in the proximity of the actual truth.
Said plainly: Reason and evidence is awesome and useful when unmapped territory is minor and all adjacent territory is thoroughly and accurately mapped. The problem arises in: who mapped that adjacent territory? And how can we be sure it’s accurate?
Rationalism is only a few centuries old. And Rats would be the first to claim that even in the so-called “Age of Reason” it is rarely ever used.2 And this becomes exponentially more true the deeper we dive into our foundational assumptions about the world.
Don’t you find it troubling that despite all sharing the same methodology, Rationalists share almost no conclusions in common?
Shouldn’t this alone open the door to the possibility that rationality is fundamentally an insufficient truth engine? Or at least that all the irrational and arational knowledge that it relies on poison it’s accuracy? Have you ever checked these priors? I mean really checked, personally? Does it even matter? If all the math we did before we got the calculator is non-credible doesn’t that turn our calculator into a random number generator? If the premise that most enlightenment spergs claim to believe in were actually valid—that explicit knowledge is the only credible epistemological system and all implicit knowledge is "evil, stupid, crazy, non credible superstition”— the answer is yes.
But herein lies the ruse. Enlightenment spergs only claim that implicit knowledge is evil, stupid, crazy, non-credible superstition. In reality, they selectively hold dozens of implicit-derived beliefs they have never rationally verified.
Christian morality? Kept most of that. Democracy? A little bruised but he’ll live. Human rights? Stronger than ever. Yeah, yeah, we know that if you delete God you lose the foundation for souls and if you lose the foundation for souls you lose the foundation for establishing individual human worth and without individual human worth every legal and philosophical principle of Western thought we hold so dear becomes completely baseless but would you just cut it out man? You some kinda retard, against human rights or something? Anyone ever teach you basic human decency?
They tried. Didn’t stick. Sorry.
Few are socially inept enough to look, but for the few of us that are it is clear as day: If you kill God then you take human rights, Democracy, equality, Humanism, Individualism, civil liberties, civil rights, Liberalism, private property, etc with him. Every last one become based on nothing other than yur feewings.
Don’t believe me? Let’s walk through it.
What else, my dear thinkboi, do you intend to justify human value with if not souls? If humans are not in fact forged from the source of all goodness and beauty (God) what makes us worth more than bugs or dirt?
Species is an arbitrary category made up for the convenience of autistic nerds. The biological difference between you and a bonobo—or for that matter, a sea sponge—is of degree not kind. Intelligence is obviously a nonstarter for poorly endowing our beloved Jogger Americans. And self-awareness (Consciousness) means mentally ill schizos like me are what peak male performance looks like.
Pretty sure you’re out of options, king.
Without species, intelligence, or consciousness, you ain’t got jack shit even remotely kosher with materialism to base your cutesy human rights and democracy on.
Meaning your cherished foundational beliefs are equally (if not less) rational than the “obviously nonexistent” magic sky daddy. And yet you believe them anyway. Why? Because your God-fearin’ grandpappy did and no one has yet found a way to profit off convincing you otherwise is why.
The postmodernists tried. So did their rightwing descendants. Whether they had any success is up for debate (You can help me become perhaps the first by subscribing though!).
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for all the other goofy junk you believe in, value, or act out that you just assume despite never having verified.
The only difference between Rationalists whining about “magic sky daddy” from their cozy Christian societies and Communists whining about “capitalist exploitation” from their iPhones is about a standard deviation in IQ scores.
Sadly, intelligence does not make one magically immune to hypocrisy. But in my thirty-one years of living among the Sapiens I have learned at least one thing of value: ignore what people say, trust only what they do. And based on how Rat’s actually behave it’s pretty obvious what they really believe is:
Irrational or arational systems are epistemically valid; implicit knowledge is credible and explicit knowledge serves predominantly to refine its occasional errors.
Using our calculator analogy: implicit knowledge doesn’t output RNG numbers like the Enlightenment spergs claim. It outputs integers. And all explicit knowledge does is convert them into floats.
And thus, Rationalists’ derision of implicit knowledge structures and worship of explicit ones makes about as much sense as Mathematicians deriding Arabic numerals to worship decimal notation would. ie it doesn’t. It’s completely braindead. GG no re. Cope. Seethe. Dilate.
But fret not anon. There is a bright side to the realization that even our geniuses are clueless: there is something interesting—and likely valuable—buried here.
Part two “Steelmanning Irrationality” coming soon™. Subscribe if you want to read it.
If you want to comment that I should have used P, A, and B here: go touch grass and send pics first or I will block you.
I think rationality is actually used all the time in every human belief. And that this is actually the problem. Rationality is a shitty calculator and most of us are just too busy idealizing what we wish it were to see what it actually is. But more on this another time.
I think rationality (defined as using the best evidence available to draw conclusions) is a wonderful reasoning tool, and in reading this post, I don't actually think you'd even disagree. I think your major concern lies with the Atheism+ crowd, who rapaciously grab at every opportunity to assert moral and intellectual superiority, meanwhile never questioning their moral intuitions and asserting their flavor of ethics is just "downstream" from their reasoning. In any case, I enjoyed this overall.
AI/ML research presents an interesting case study of a field that has to contend with the limitations you're outlining here.
There's been a longstanding naivety in the field about how straightforward it is to formalize information (as understood by humans) into data (as readable by machines).
One of the reasons that this is so hard is that when trying to convert real-world, common sense, human intuitive information into tabulated data via sensors so that a computer can process it, the information loss is absolutely massive.
This is because when humans process 'data' in their minds, they're in fact doing this on a massive, opaque, complex, changing substructure of assumptions, experiences, intuitions, inductions, deductions, biases, ideologies etc. and they're pulling in all kinds of contextual information and memories that computers have no access to. This allows humans to use 'common sense' to choose a single, coherent interpretation of a situation out of a theoretically limitless set of possible interpretations.
All computers can ultimately do is statistically manipulate these incredibly reductive datasets, and then researchers can crudely tack this onto a pre-set research or operational context.
It turns out that 'thinking' is much more art than science.