#rationalism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #rationalism, aggregated by home.social.
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My explanation of "rationalism":
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#TIL what #TESCREAL means. I'm impressed by the explanatory power of conceiving of this cluster of #ideologies as an #interconnected #aggregate which then get used to justify #harm
I feel like a lightbulb went on and that I understand the current state we're all in a bit better now.
Highly recommend starting with the @wikipedia article, which covers the #concept and some of the #criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
Thanks go to #Bhante #Sujato (https://sujato.me/) for making me aware of the term.
#transhumanism #extropianism #singularitarianism #singularity #cosmism #rationalism #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #transhumanist #transhuman #longnow #eugenics #AGI #utopia #utopianism #bigtech
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Roko's Basilisk makes more sense if you consider that people are compelled to build Superintelligence as fast as possible, not because of fear of retribution from said Superintelligence, but for fear of being punished for not holding a stake in said Superintelligence.
It's more of a "permanent underclass" rather than "build God" position
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Wang Chong: The Rationalist of Han China
The Self-Taught Rebel Born around 27 CE in Shangyu (modern-day Zhejiang) during the turbulent Eastern Han Dynasty, Wang Chong was a man of humble origins who could not afford to buy books. Instead, he stood at marketplace bookstalls, memorizing texts as he read them. This self-taught scholar rose to become one of the most radical thinkers in Chinese history, challenging the superstitious orthodoxy that dominated his era. While the court blamed ghosts, omens, and "Heaven's displeasure" for political corruption and natural disasters, Wang Chong dared to ask: "What is the evidence?"
Materialism and the Indifferent Universe Wang Chong’s central philosophical breakthrough was a mechanistic, materialist worldview. He argued that the universe operates according to fixed natural laws (qi), not divine will.
Heaven has no intention: Contrary to the prevailing belief that Heaven rewards virtue and punishes vice, Wang Chong asserted that Heaven is an impersonal, natural force. Earthquakes, floods, and comets are physical phenomena, not moral messages.
Human insignificance: Famously stating that "Man holds a place in the universe like that of a flea under a robe," he stripped humanity of its cosmic centrality. We are not the focus of a divine drama but tiny, transient parts of a vast, indifferent machine.
Rejection of Ghosts: He systematically dismantled ghost stories with logical rigor. If ghosts exist, he asked, why do they wear clothes (which have no spirit)? Why do they need food offerings? He attributed ghost sightings to psychological factors, fear, and hallucination.
Evidence Over Authority In an age where knowledge was derived from ancient texts and the authority of Confucius, Wang Chong introduced a proto-scientific method. He demanded concrete evidence and logical consistency for all claims.
Critique of Authority: He treated Confucius not as a divine sage but as a fallible human scholar who sometimes made mistakes.
The Scientific Method: His approach mirrored modern science: observe phenomena, form hypotheses, test against reason and experience, and reject claims without evidence.
Natural Explanations: Before invoking supernatural causes, he exhausted all natural possibilities. He explained medicine through physiology, not demonic possession, and astronomy through mechanics, not divine intervention.
Legacy: The Voice That Waited Despite his brilliance, Wang Chong was largely ignored and marginalized in his lifetime. His masterpiece, the Lunheng ("Balanced Enquiries"), containing 85 essays on everything from meteorology to ethics, was too dangerous for the establishment. However, his ideas survived underground, influencing later Neo-Daoist thinkers and resurfacing powerfully in the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern scholars recognize him as a pioneer of Chinese rationalism and empiricism, proving that the seeds of scientific thinking existed in East Asia long before the European Enlightenment.
To watch the lecture: https://tube.leshley.ca/w/tr2CNredCTN85BgTPuABDi
#WangChong #HanDynasty #ChinesePhilosophy #Philosophy #Rationalism -
I’m still really proud of this writing I did awhile back, and think it’s becoming relevant in new ways: what if #Rationalism was the real #infohazard all along?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/122843770 -
How To Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same […] -
"I think, therefore I am." - René Descartes (1596 AD to 1650 AD)
Descartes lived during the Thirty Years' War and the Scientific Revolution. By using radical doubt, he established modern rationalism and mind-body dualism.
Source: Discourse on the Method (compiled via Google Gemini)
#GreatThinkers #philosophy #descartes #rationalism #mind #history #science
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Leibniz's 'Monadology' presents a rational system founded on creation from nothing. But in 'Principles of Nature and Grace' he admits: 'these are matters of faith, not reason.'
The emperor has no clothes.
👉 https://www.johnmackay.net/cod-thesis-c0220-gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz.htm
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Every now and then someone brings up #EffectiveAltruism, #TESCREAL, #RokosBasilisk, #Rationalism, or some other #Musk related nonsense. I ridicule it, or laugh, and move on. The whole evil god of Roko's Basilisk is so silly it doesn't feel worth writing about. But people started a whole cult over it and killed a bunch of people.
Since then I've been meaning to actually spend time tearing it down. So I think it's time to go kill a god. Fortunately it involves making fun of Elon Musk specifically and all the #AI-pilled #TechBros more generally, so that's nice I guess.
Also, I make the argument that we're all in a simulation that only exists to torture Elon Musk.
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Would it be rash of me to suggest that we are currently living in the Age of Rashionalism? A time when arguments and detractions are made in such haste because we lack tolerance for anyone being wrong on the internet. Also we no longer have the attention span required to think anything through.
It's a worry, but I can either laugh or cry.
#reason #argument #public #debate #rationalism #social #media #postEnlightenment #philosophy #politics #shortsightedness #economics #puns
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Vampire Island wants the thrill of proving vampires were real—then quietly redefines “real” as misunderstood corpses and contagious disease. Investigation into the Invisible World hovers around elves and clairvoyants without ever asking the one question that matters: where’s the evidence?
#Documentary #FilmCriticism #Skepticism #CriticalThinking #Vampires #Elves #Folklore #Science #Myth #MovieReview #Rationalism
https://pablohoneyfish.wordpress.com/2026/03/04/the-historiography-of-the-unfalsifiable-forensic-rationalism-and-the-aesthetic-of-belief-in-speculative-documentary-media/ -
www.honest-broker.com/p/25-proposi... 1/Well it is a Friday-so why not! Here is something to aspire to: the rise of #romanticism and fall of #rationalism I am totally into making this a reality. My contribution is to write stories that imagine how this could become real and what it could look like
25 Propositions about the New ... -
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/25-propositions-about-the-new-romanticism
Well it is a Friday - so why not! Here is something to aspire to: the rise of #romanticism and fall of #rationalism
While I am totally into making this a reality and my contribution is to write stories that imagine how this could become reality and what it could look like, the thing that Ted Gioia doesn't acknowledge in his dreaming is the ticking clock of #climatechange and the threat to #survival of hundreds of millions in the coming years.
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“Vegan anarco trans humanism“ or “vegan siths” 😂🤦🏽♂️🤣🤦🏽♂️🤷🏾♂️
“Need to instal new Mental tech”
#Scientology #StarWars #Zizians
#techbros #InteligenciaArtificial #BehindTheBastards #AI #SelfHelp #Humanism #Rationalism #Fediverse -
Escuchando un podcast de historia (en este caso específico, historia reciente, de #techbros y su ambiente) estoy comenzando a entender un poco mejor la estupidez que prevalece en el actual mundo de la #InteligenciaArtificial
Me entero de la existencia de los racionalistas y los extremos a los que llegan con su variante de “auto ayuda” y “humanismo”. Son como que el opuesto del Fediverso. #MirrorMirror #StarTrek
#BehindTheBastards
#AI #SelfHelp #Humanism #Rationalism #Fediverse -
1/ "The first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human Mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exist."
- P11: Ethics, Spinoza
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Writing and speaking can be used/mistreated/instumentalised/weaponised "not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, in "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" @ben
#criticalTheory #communication #media #knowledge #publicOpinion #epistemology #agnotology #rationalism #reason #truth #wordsMatter #semiotics #Deleuze #Guattari #Capitalism #quote #quotes #FrenchTheory #subjugate
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Too much sadness, too much terror;
There is a reason my dog is named “Linus” — “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” is one of the most beautiful examples of Linus Van Pelt being an amazing philosopher from the [IMO] #Spinoza school.
#DogsOfMastodon #philosophy #enlightenment #rationalism #art #comics #SocialCommentary #PoliticalCommentary #CharlesMSchulz
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“Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, in "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia"
#criticalTheory #communication #media #knowledge #publicOpinion #epistemology #agnotology #rationalism #reason #truth #wordsMatter #semiotics #Deleuze #Guattari #Capitalism #quote #quotes #FrenchTheory
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"To say something factually correct is already to have an #opinion on what to do with it."
Lauréline #Fontaine: "In a society of law built since the end of the Middle Ages around the protection of trade and exchange, truth has progressively acquired the status of a social necessity: it excludes uncertainty and produces the trust necessary for the maintenance and development of exchanges."
"The category of truth in the social space is not - in fact - the object of a monopoly (including in a scientific community tightly bound around certain protocols intended to produce it): the category of #truth is a very liberal practice, or even neo-liberal to use a paradigm of analysis that has become commonplace today. It is the object of a form of permanent competition, depending on the means available to some and others to appropriate it or reveal it."
fr https://www.ledroitdelafontaine.fr/entretien-sur-la-verite-en-democratie/
#communication #media #knowledge #publicOpinion #epistemology #agnotology #rationalism #reason #intelligence #truth #wordsMatter #democracy
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🥳 Oh, look! A spicy stew of buzzwords - transgender ideology, #rationalism, and #veganism - mixed into a deliciously absurd "death cult." 🍽️ Because clearly, when you run out of real news, it's time to stir the pot with sensationalist gibberish. 🤡
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/16/inside-the-trans-vegan-death-cult/ #transgenderideology #deathcult #sensationalism #HackerNews #ngated -
The Zizians' deadly fusion of transgender ideology, rationalism and veganism
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/16/inside-the-trans-vegan-death-cult/
#HackerNews #transgender #ideology #rationalism #veganism #culture #critique #death #cult
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Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rationalist-cults#taking-ideas-seriously"One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger. But another potential failure is that, knowing both that your society is wrong and that you can’t do better, you start looking for someone even more right. Paradoxically, the desire to ignore the experts can make rationalists more vulnerable to a charismatic leader."
