But that capture was fleeting, because most people can't worship a void. In a moment like this anyone who can speak in the rabbinical mode can found a cult, even by accident. This was Eliezer Yudkowsky, or "Big Yud", a name whose qabbalistic implications we are still working out
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Rationalists are, in Scott Alexander's formulation, missing a mood, or rather, they are drawn from a pool of mostly men who are missing one. "Normal" people instinctively grasp social norms without having them explained. Rationalists lack this instinct
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In particular, they struggle with small talk and other social norms around speech, because they naively think words are a vehicle for their literal meanings. Yud's sequences help this by formalizing the implicit decisions that normal people make
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The map is not the territory. Your mental model of the world is just a representation of the world. In order to fit the big world in your little head, many things are omitted or distorted. you will never see the real world, only your map
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There is a certain type of nerd who really, really can't pick up on social cues, can't read intentions. It's overly reductive to tar this kind of person as "autistic". It's a large number of men, highly comorbid with mathematical aptitude
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The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up
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In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate.
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The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice
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The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"
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And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.
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ftr I think this is complete bullshit - rationalists are the type of nerd who forgoes social acceptance in search of truth, that's the opposite of being easy to lie to
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you *can* catch them off guard because their ingroup norms against lying are so strong they don't expect it anymore, but once they find you out they'll drop back into their old paranoid self and good luck then