To be fair it did work out suprisingly well in the early days, even the really weird comment chains attracted only a small minority of the bizarrely deranged. Probably because back then the median LW commentator was noticeably smarter than the median HN commentator.

Pascal’s mugging was even coined there I believe, but then as it grew… whatever communal anti-derangement protections existed gradually declined.

And it now is more often than not a negative example.

I am not against rationalism at all despite my quoting of Hume. Reason is essential and has done much good to the world. It's just that things tend to get kooky at the tail end of any distribution.

The rationalist community have some of the smartest people and the best blogs, and they think through things much more thoroughly and are much less prone to biases and fallacies than most online communities.

I feel like it's not a question if you can, but if you should.

Are you actually smart if you spend any significant amount of time thinking through things in order to be rational?

I have a good friend that is by all reasonable metrics incredibly smart. Graduated high school and college at the same time at age 16. Doctorate at 22. Professor at a top university for several years. But lives in absolute squalor and spends his time and brain power on rational thinking and philosophy to understand life.

But, it is life, and if you don't experience it how can you understand it, and if you do understand it, what is gained?

His life is the inside of his house and a daily trip to Dollar general to buy mountain dew, cigarettes and frozen burritos.

I'll take Kurt Vonnegut, from "Mother Night":

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.