Is there a "New Rationalism"? CFAR or Center for Applied Rationality, LessWrong.com, etc.

From time to time the discovery is made that most people think pretty irrationally.  Often too, people have gotten the idea that some kind of new emphasis on rationality will put an end to the horrors of despotism, warfare, and much more.  Perhaps it will work out some day, but experience suggests caution, and I doubt we have seen the last of the false hopes raised by such thinking.  I don't want to attack CFAR (see below) and its siblings, but I do approach them skeptically.


The eighteenth century Enlightenment was a major episode of hope in rationality -- a long burst of enthusiasm for exchanging "priestcraft" and reliance on ancient books of obscure origins for a new practice of reading the "book of nature"; for properly and skeptically reasoning about the world in front of our eyes, the "experimental method", and so on.

One major aspect was the belief that, freed from mental chains, people would inevitably understand that "rational self interest" called for acting in a civilized way and treating others decently.

The mystery of the mind or soul was "solved" via utilitarianism, and the idea of sanely going about maximizing comfort and pleasure would replace the irrational religious passions that caused so much bloodshed and disorder in the two centuries preceding the Enlightenment.

Around the middle of the 20th century, the Objectivists, organized around Ayn Rand were one group of people who seemed certain they had found the keys to rationality, with which the world's problems could be solved.  Rand had no tolerance for disagreement, and sought to make her philosophical system invulnerable with an "epistemology" all her own, as presented in her book Objectivist Epistemology, as well as in Atlas Shruged's 3-4 hour (if you listen to it on tape) John Galt speech to the captive world audience.  Of course Galt, the great freedom lover, was not guilty of making them captive.  The totalitarian state set up a broadcast to promote their tyranny; he merely hacked into their system and hijacked it.

I recently ran across a network of interconnected organizations which has people passionately debating logical fallacies and promoting Baysean reasoning as the key to a new rationality.  There is something called the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) at http://appliedrationality.org/ which is somehow affiliated with a "community blog" called LessWrong.org.  Its main page announces "a community discussion board, a source of edited rationality ... And a promoter of regular meetups around the world."  Group members seem strongly oriented towards saving the world by promoting rationality.  They are not without a sense of humor; a major source of wisdom for the group is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a "fanfiction" book by Less Wrong celebrity Eliezer Yudkowsky.  You can download it as free podcasts from https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-potter-methods-rationality/id431784580, and it is funny and entertaining, not just read, but acted by quite a good group of actors.

[to be continued]