Or did you mean "dogma held with religious fervor/intensity"? If so, I will agree with you. People hold political views the way they used to hold religion, and it has not improved politics...
What would pseudo-rationalism even be? Purported rationalism, yes, but the rationalism would be just a smokescreen for positions that are not rationally derived and therefore not addressable by means of rational argument.
I don't understand why you think asocialism or self-interest is the opposite of rationalism. I think that's on an orthogonal axis.
Bonus points for obfuscating your positions with in-group jargon and mathematical terminology that you don't actually understand. Nattering on about 'Bayesian priors' won't make you any more effective at reasoning than coconut headphones will help land airplanes, but it might keep people from challenging your ideas. If it does so because they've written you off as a fool or because you've successfully snowed them, you'll never know.
The fundamental question of philosophy: how do you tell a rationally derived belief from an irrationally derived belief?
The former, I could change, given enough data.
The latter, I am willing to die for (or rather, attack other people for). However, I could change it after hanging out with different people for long time.
So? The western states killed and enslaved just as many under various names (from christianity and manifest destiny, to democracy and free trade and "the free world").
What happened in the name of an idea doesn't mean the idea is bad or that what happened is an inevitable part of the idea.
Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there. (Well, maybe. I suspect that at least to some degree, she already had her position, and derived her axioms from there, then argued for her position from her axioms.) So I attack her position by saying that in her third axiom, she mis-defines consciousness, and the rest of her errors follow from her flawed starting position. That's rational. "It leaves me cold" is not a rational response. (It may be an indication that you feel there's something wrong with the position, even if you can't define it or prove it, and that's fine. But it's not a rational response.)
(Sorry if it comes across overly pedantic and twisted: non-native speaker, not enough sleep, words hard.)
There's no way to arrive "logically" at value judgements.
You can just use logic as a klutch to support your pre-determined positions (and, of course, which is totally rational as a practice, to spread, support and enforce them).
"Things are what they are. There is only one reality, namely the way things are."
That's only true for the least interesting things: objects and their arrangements in space-time.
On that, the huge majority (besides maybe crazy people) agrees anyway, when they see them, or when they're given evidence of them (e.g. a photo of a laptop on a desk. 99.999% of the people will agree there's a laptop on a desk there).
For anything else, politics, values, claims and the veracity of claims, morality, motives, aesthetics, goals, etc., there is no single way things are, there are ways people perceive them, and there are different interets, worldviews, and ways of interpreting them.
What is the "reality" or "non-reality" of "I'm willing to die for my country"? Or of "I find it OK to make money stealing"? Or "You should treat people well even if you are not forced to|?
Because, "of course", "rationally" nobody other than a fascist or such would care for tradition and traditional values or use such terms positively.
Only whether you're traditionalist or progressivist or whatever is a value judgement and a world-view, not something to put as rational or irrational. Those that say the opposite irattionally impose their value/preferences as "rational reason".
"Traditional" being a traditional (heh) dogwhistle for the alt-right".
He could be to the right of Hitler, and the argument could still be wrong.
(I guess now you can write "I figured as much", and dismiss my comment, as if the particular and not the principle is what's important).
i.e:
* Yudkowsky using a fundamentally flawed argument to state and defend the idea that pure utilitarianist mathematics in some circumstances excuses and justifies lifelong imprisonment and torture (And then proceeded to use that as an example of our morality itself being flawed by human perception(!))
(Citations for this can be found on the accompanying rational wiki page, which is kind enough to both give commentary, and also link to the web archive page just in case it's lost)
* Roko (of Roko's Baselisk) recently "rationally" advocating for conservative "traditionalist" futurism, and in the process arguing that the capability that technology gives us to remove human rights consensually, would be a positive thing, among other extremely flawed claims.
(Citations for this can be found by doing a search of his twitter, it's only about three days old at this point)
And that (the part I didn't actually type out, because I assumed it was common knowledge, unfortunately) that these arguments and mindsets are fundamentally products of a pseudo-rationalist movement, that is typically referred to as the Neo-reactionary Movement, or more commonly (and by it's proponents as well -- see [0]) the Dark Enlightenment.
Rational Wiki has a very long, very expansive, and very detailed article on that movement in particular -- see [1]. That article directly links it to Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, and Less Wrong as a whole (with sufficient citations), as they were hugely formative in creating the pseudo-rationalism inherent in that movement.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140108010125/http://blog.jim.c...
> Or the creator of Roko's Baselisk openly stating recently on twitter that he wants "Traditional Futurism" ("Traditional" being a traditional (heh) dogwhistle for the alt-right [rational wiki article to dog whistles])
My post was talking about a very specific group of people (The Less Wrong community, and the Neo-Reactionary movement -- although in recent years Rationalist organizations and magazines like New Humanist have distanced themselves and placed themselves in opposition to those communities), and in the case of that specific quote I think it is clear that I was talking about the meaning of "Traditional" in the context of those tweets.
I don't think it's a valid or accurate argument to generalize my call-out of the word "traditional", within that to suddenly be about every single usage, ever, of the word "traditional" -- and in the process completely ignore the associations and context of that word.
Perhaps if I had known in advance that it would be mislead, I would have written:
> "Traditional" in this case being a common dogwhistle used in neo-reactionary and pseudo-rationalist circles.
In addition, the point of dog whistles (if you read the Rational Wiki article) is that it is a signal that people outside of the culture will easily dismiss, or think benign. There is a reason that the Traditional Values Coalition[0] is called that, or the Traditional Britain Group[1] is named so. And likewise there is a reason that a major money fund in the anti-abortion movement is called "Focus on the Family"[2].
The point of using them is that they are brushed off, pushed aside, or excused in exactly the same way you are doing, by well-meaning folks who are not present in those cultures.
[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Traditional_Values_Coalition
[1]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Traditional_Britain_Group
LessWrong-rationalism is just crackpottery.
This brings to mind a review of Stephen Hicks “Explaining Postmodernism”. In the book he contrasts postmodernism with objectivism: postmodernists are irrational while objectivists are rational. And once you look long enough at the comparison tables you realize that there is no philosophy there; it’s just “bad thing” v.s. “good thing”.
Kind of like “rationalism”, that obvious good thing. Who wouldn’t want to be rational? What’s our philosophy? Uh, to be rational? To be for good things and against bad things?
Hence your indignation at putting pseudo in front of that word: how could one possibly object to something called rationalism? Hello, it’s in the name—rationalism! It’s about being rational. What more do you want, Jack?
“Per se”...
And nice touch with the but-religion-though. That was a zinger.