19/11/25
Context
Below I will be sharing some source/quote tweets which kicked off this discourse in my corner
of twitter, my tweet thread response to it all, and finally an essay regarding the topic on the whole.
It hit on several topics which I love including theology, the limits of rationality/post-rationalism, and
philosophy (my love has always been cursory, though this inspired me to start reading it seriously!).
I haven't written an essay in years or published one, but this topic moved me enough to do so.
Some Notes
...
Tweets
Tweet #1
#1.1 (Aella): "Fwiw I consider someone an (aspiring) rationalist mostly if they've read the sequences and make some ongoing effort to practice the art of rationality in their daily life. Ppl often practice at meetups, so it's correlated, but meetup attendance does not a rationalist make"
#1.2 (Zy in reply to #1): "You see how this is a religion, right?"
#1.3 (Zy quote tweets his reply (#2) to the original tweet (#1)): "This is still so funny to me. Classic rationalists!"
Tweet #2
#2.1 Prudence's Substack article "Is rationalism a Religion? What is a Religion?", in response to the above, which is what kicked off the whole discourse/beef on this.
Tweet #3
3.1
The homie Orph's take on Prudence's essay.
My Quote Tweets
4.1
First viewport of my quote tweet thread of Orph's QT
Viewport #2
5.1
Scrubbed my handle but not much anonymity if you really wanted to find me lol, but I digress.
Primer for the Uninitiated
Rationalism, Religion, and the Ecology Around Them
Before getting into any of the themes that follow: ‘rationalism’ as a pseudo-religious movement, the strange persistence of moral impulses even after we declare ourselves “beyond” religion, the Pelagian temptation in epistemic virtue cultures etc., it’s worth laying out the landscape.
Most readers outside certain online or Bay Area subcultures will have only passing familiarity with the proper nouns and inherited debates I’m about to reference, and while I don’t consider myself a ‘rationalist’,
I have had passing familiarity with such inclinations back in my teenage years, and since 2023 and my deciding to hop on twitter, much of the accounts I folow/mutuals can be said to be former adherents/adjacent to the scene.
This is just incidental as among other things, I am a software developer. The rationalist scene was born in the Bay Area and thus many of it’s adherents and notable figures were professionals in the tech scene, most notably in A.I.
Therefore in discovering interesting, funny techesque accounts, I ended up developing an algorithmic environment which exposed me to the scenes egregore, and some of it’s core figures especially in the postrat (post-rationalism) scene, but that’s a story for another day! This is that map.
1. What “Rationalism” Means in This Context
Here rationalism doesn’t mean “being reasonable.” It refers to a loose intellectual movement — mostly online, centered around:- LessWrong (founded 2009 by Eliezer Yudkowsky)
- Slate Star Codex (now Astral Codex Ten, by Scott Alexander)
- AI safety/alignment communities
- Bay Area tech, meetups, and ‘rationalist houses’
- The ‘Sequences’, a gigantic corpus of essays forming the movement’s canon
- Epistemic virtue culture: Bayesian reasoning, calibration, “thinking in probabilities,” eliminating bias, “noticing confusion,” etc
Essay
...