Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread for February 3 - 10 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: NancyLebovitz 03 February 2014 03:30PM

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Comment author: ITakeBets 08 February 2014 03:11:54PM 6 points [-]

So... What do we make of this?

Excerpt:

He is a rationalist who is deeply against living by social norms and just sees them as defaults, and is “non-default” about pretty much everything including work path, values etc., as well as lifestyle including cooking (lives off takeaway so as not to spend time grocery shopping and cooking), cleaning (does not have much of a regular cleaning habit – I broke glass in his kitchen a month ago and he said I shouldn’t have to clean it up and it’s still there), sleeping (he has no regular sleep schedule and sleeps when he wants to. The kind of work that he does is largely from home with long deadlines. He ships a prescription anti-narcolepsy from overseas which allows him to stay awake for long stretches on little sleep – although he plans on giving this up soon). He also takes party drugs and for a while, was taking quite high amounts of MDMA on a weekly basis, which pretty much wiped him out the day or two after. I have always been uncomfortable around drugs, although he did not really know the extent of my discomfort, and I can’t take them myself due to mental health. He dropped back to once a month after I expressed concerns about escalation and he acknowledges that he has some susceptibility to addiction, although he is not currently dependent.“

One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested. I was furious at his intellectual arrogance and the danger he had put us both in. I lost a week of unpaid time off work and my mum had to nurse me through my allergic reaction to the treatment. I told him I wanted to break up, but we ended up supporting each other through the treatment and ultimately decided to get back together and work things out.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 09 February 2014 10:00:24PM *  2 points [-]

There is often mentioned "LW" in the comments, but it seems to be an abbreviation for Letter Writer (the person who wrote the letter about the "rationalist"), not LessWrong. It took me some time to realize this.

Well, I expected that making "rationality" popular would bring some problems. If we succeed to make the word "rationality" high-status, suddenly all kinds of people will start to self-identify as "rationalists", without complying with our definition. (And the next step will be them trying to prove they are the real "rationalists", and all the others are fakes.) But I didn't expect this kind of thing, and this soon.

On the other hand, there doesn't have to be any connection with us. (EDIT: I was wrong here.) I mean... LessWrong does not have a copyright on "rationality".

Comment author: ITakeBets 09 February 2014 10:09:07PM *  6 points [-]

there doesn't have to be any connection with us

Comments mention HPMoR, and letter writer says he read it aloud to her. The Modafinil use is also circumstantial evidence.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 10 February 2014 11:54:31AM *  4 points [-]

Thanks for pointing this out; I didn't read all the comments previously (only the first third, or so) because there is so many of them. (Here is a link to the HPMoR comment, for other curious people.) I've read the remaining ones now.

By the way, the comments are closed today. (They were still open yesterday.) I am happy someone was fast enough to post there this:

Somewhat related: a major rationalist perspective on the importance of saying oops (http://lesswrong.com/lw/i9/the_importance_of_saying_oops/) (hint: it’s very important, the guy you’re dealing with should have done it a long time ago for all the things he messed up on, and you should flee him) and feelings (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/) (hint: it is rational to feel, not to deny others’ feelings).

tl;dr: LW, this dude is calling himself “rational” but is not rational.

Reading the comments, I am impressed by their high quality. I actually feared something like using "rationality" as a boo light, but there is only an occassional fallacy of gray (everyone is equally irrational), and only a very few commenters try to generalize the behavior to men in general. Based on my experience from the rest of the internet, I expected much more of that. Actually, there are also some very smart comments, like:

it is rational and logical to take emotions into account. Emotions are real things that human beings have – we have them often for good reasons, and we’re not Vulcans (besides, I’m betting both Spock and Tuvok have really neat clean quarters and would never leave broken glass lying around to defy the man, because it would not be logical). Anyway. Emotions are valid. Caring for the emotional well being of your loved ones is important and also a rational choice. People have different preferences for things, and feel differently about things, and negotiating those differences is a huge part of a good relationship.

If by chance the person who wrote the letter comes here, I strongly recommend reading "The Mask of Sanity" for a descriptions of how psychopaths work. I believe some of the examples would pattern-match very strongly.

And the lesson for the LessWrong community is probably this: Some psychopaths will find LW and HPMoR, and will use "rationality" as their excuse. We should probably have some visible FAQ that contradicts them. (On a second thought: Having the FAQ on LessWrong would not have helped in this specific case, because the abusive boyfriend only showed her HPMoR. And having this kind of disclaimer on HPMoR would probably feel weird. Maybe the best solution would be to have a link to the LessWrong FAQ on the HPMoR web page; something like: "This fan fiction is about rationality. Read here more about what is - and what isn't - considered rational by its author.)

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