Nathan Spears

To sum up: "don't delude yourself, use reason and evidence" is a necessary but insufficient tool in building a complete worldview, but afaics it's where rationalism's toolkit stops. We also need tools for processing and improving the quality of our personal experience.

It's an instantiation at the personal level of this kind of thinking at the social level: "all metrics indicate that your happiness is at an all time high. why so sad"https://twitter.com/AdamSinger/status/1108797046138400768?s=20 …

Meanwhile, if there is some part of your body/soul/awareness, whatever you want to call the non-rational component of your being, that is calling for your attention, if you can't find a "rational" way to articulate it, you can't even acknowledge its existence.

feeling good about having rid themselves of superstitious nonsense and poor sense-making. And . . . now what? There is no next step, as far as I can see. Coast on that sense of mental and moral superiority as long as you can?

Perhaps if you're a visible figure (1 / 10^?) people will compliment you on your excellent and clear thought processes. But most people in that community are supporters, not leaders, invisible hordes appearing at Sam Harris events and going back to their lives afterward, /

The problem I'm trying to articulate here is that neither the structure of this meta-process, nor the rationalist community as it is in the world, cares at all about the internal quality of your personal existence. It mostly cares that you don't speak nonsense.

people will have no choice but to be happy and fulfilled, because bad ways of thinking and being are responsible for suffering, and when you get rid of them the suffering will go as well.

definitely going to get flak for religious bs, superstition, hippy nonsense, pseudo-science, or whatever else. So the idea seems to be that if we get rid of bad ways of thinking and being, then all that will be left are good ways of thinking and being, at which point /

I won't claim that there's some universal guidebook to rationalism, or to having "a scientific worldview," but this is the vibe I've gotten from the community in general: those who use other methods or "alternative ways of knowing" to make decisions or interpret reality are /

I'd challenge the first implicit axiom by observing that your quality of experience is not dependent on your quality of empirical analysis, and the second by challenging the working definition of "real."

The oft-unspoken, but I think crucial implicit axiom in the above is: * This leads to us having the best experiences or perhaps * This may not lead to the best subjective experience, but at least it leads to real experiences, which are ultimately best because real

Trying to articulate this: * Rationalism seeks to discover truth through using reason to analyze empirical evidence * This truth gives us our best access to reality * We should bring our internal models and lived processes into alignment with this method and with these truths

One of the things I struggle to articulate about the limits of rationalism is something like: The structure of rationalism doesn't care about the quality of your personal experience.

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