[missblit]

Rationalism doesn't involve doing math, but _role-playing_ like you're doing math. There's lots of talk about updating priors and bayes; but in practice a lot of stuff isn't that quantifiable without running scientific studies, so this comes down to #yolo-ing it.

Of course thinking about stuff without always using formal statistics is fine and how people work, but if you trick yourself into thinking that you do use statistics for everything it may become harder to evaluate or second guess your own thinking.

[Trasmatta]

Math LARPing is very accurate. I'm so sick of them talking about Bayes and "adjusting priors", because the way they use it is so loose that it can be used to justify literally anything.

[escapecharacter]

I was at a talk last week where a guy said “we should backprop into X” to mean “we should learn more about X and take it into account”.

[pron]

I think they're pretty much ideologically opposed to serious research. They believe in pre-scientific "thinking from first principles", like Aristotle or something, using whatever data they can gather in a few minutes while avoiding any serious scholarship that would put the data in context, because then you're just an inside-the-box-thinking expert, rather than the freethinker with novel ideas that can only come when you don't know what you're talking about.