My falling-out with the rationalist community

This is an article I resisted writing for a long time. I didn’t pull the trigger in the mid-2010s, in the glory days of the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex / murder cult that originated from the same community.

Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality. And is it really fair to condemn the entire community just because of the occasional murder cult? He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…

But enough with bad jokes. Today, I wanted to offer a more personal perspective on how I got involved with the early form of the movement and why I’ve grown wary of it long before all the alleged murdering.

The skeptic in you

If you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain just how quirky the internet of the 1990s was. It’s when distant cultures made contact for the first time. No one was selling, no one was buying, no one was making big bucks. It was just pure Yakov Smirnoff comedy.

It’s when the scientists and engineers who built the network found themselves locked in the same room with “kooks” — those who believed in alien abductions, Bigfoot, perpetual motion, and so on. As you can imagine, these newcomers seized the opportunity to challenge the academic consensus in the most direct way possible.

The resulting fights on the Usenet and on web forums attracted crowds of spectators and turned into one of the internet’s earliest cultural phenomena. Of course, as a rational person, you wanted to side with the scientists; if nothing else, it seemed like the winning move. The scientific camp — the skeptics — had two patron saints: James Randi, a magician turned an investigator of paranormal fraud; and Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist originally known for speaking against the church.

As the skeptic community solidified, it started to play offense: we hunted cranks for sport and honed our rhetorical skills. We knew all the logical fallacies by heart and had citations at the ready. It felt intoxicating: you were the smart guy in the room, able to immediately humiliate any flat-earther with a single, surgical rebuke.

Even back then, the pastime sometimes turned crass. I remember the Timecube affair; Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims. It was clearly put together by a mentally ill person, but that didn’t stop the community from having fun. The spectacle culminated in the site’s owner — an elderly man — being invited by students to give recorded “lectures” at MIT and Georgia Tech, simply for cheap laughs.

A more potent drug

By the late 2000s, the socioeconomic status of nerds began to change. Although pop culture still portrayed us as harmless dorks, many techies felt that they earned a seat at the grownup table — and that by the virtue of their vast intellect, their opinions about the world carried weight.

Around that time, the skeptic community in the especially affluent SF Bay Area rebranded themselves as rationalists, coalescing around websites such as Slate Star Codex and LessWrong. This new community was less concerned with merely reacting to scientific falsehoods; instead, they proactively sought the “correct” answers to what they felt were the most consequential questions of our time.

Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else. For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. A well-known example is the effective altruism movement: it started with the premise that in charitable giving, you should maximize the amount of good per dollar spent. From this, you could argue it’s OK to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn — which somehow meant that working for a cryptocurrency / AI startup was the most ethical choice you could make. Or, as someone else put it: effective altruists concluded that the most charitable thing they could do is to buy themselves a castle (literally).

Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.

On that note, I remember the 2017 affair of James Damore — a Googler who penned an internal memo arguing that there are fundamental differences between sexes that make women less interested in tech jobs. The memo itself, and Mr. Damore’s subsequent firing, made waves on national media. What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry — with citations! — that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.

By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists.

I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft.