---
date: '2025-12-13'
description: and logical coherency
id: rationality
modified: 2026-06-05 15:08:25 GMT-04:00
seealso:
  - '[[thoughts/functionalism]]'
socials:
  jkcarlsmith: https://joecarlsmith.com/category/rationality/
  lw: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-canon-on-rationality
tags:
  - pattern
  - philosophy
title: Rationality
created: '2025-12-13'
published: '2025-12-13'
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slug: thoughts/rationality
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---
Rationalist are mostly friends who read a lot <ref slug="tags/philosophy">, but have a tendency to be STEM-focused. While they valorise extremes and often build towards social goods (which is good, _generally_), having a pragmatic view about the world will probably be more efficient use of time.

Tim Dettmers capture this in his argument against [AGI](https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/):

> A key problem with ideas, particularly those coming from the Bay Area, is that they often live entirely in the idea space. Most people who think about [[thoughts/AGI]], superintelligence, scaling laws, and hardware improvements treat these concepts as abstract ideas that can be discussed like philosophical thought experiments.
> In fact, a lot of the thinking about superintelligence and AGI comes from Oxford-style philosophy. Oxford, the birthplace of effective altruism, mixed with the rationality culture from the Bay Area, gave rise to a strong distortion of how to clearly think about certain ideas. All of this sits on one fundamental misunderstanding of AI and scaling: computation is physical.

## is an underrated way to be authentic

_<https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/autenticity>_

> And it is the writing and the ideal of intellectual consistency that forces these conversations to the surface (“When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions … ”). If I had said, well my feelings are mysterious, they go one way now, then another—I would not have had the opportunity to have this dialogue with myself.
>
> In this way, reason actually becomes a process that makes me less numb to myself. By engaging myself across time, I can build layers of complexity and precision that let me go deeper than I can without the support of logic, reason, and writing. Writing is a tool for emotion as much as a tool for thought.
>
> I’m not saying this is easy. It is clearly common for people to think themselves numb. You have to take that risk seriously. Also, you have to accept that not everything can be captured in language and be sensitive to that leftover that floats around languageless in your body.
>
> The thing we are trying to get at (”your true self”) is such a complex thing. We can’t expect that it will be possible to find it using only one technique, nor capture its full nuance in any one framework. But by looking at it from many perspectives, we see more aspects of it. And we can then set these perspectives in dialogue with each other to lure out more and more insight as we try to reconcile {{sidenotes[them.]: Reading what I have written above, I realize what I’m saying sounds a bit more navelgrazing than I mean it. So I should add: this is not something that you just sit down at your desk to do once, or by going off into the woods to meditate for a week. Rather, it happens, piece by piece, day by day, as you act out what you think you stand for, get feedback from reality, and reflect on that—as you gradually unfold a life that fits you to the world, and the world to you.}}