Article URL: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985140 Points: 57 # Comments: 43

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. 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.