They WANT to think in absolutes which is a red flag in a person.

That's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?

Maybe rationalists aren’t homogeneous? Unfortunately there are a rather concerning amount of news articles detailing cases where some subset of the rationalist community has gone off the deep end.

Rationalists were right about everything that mattered: crypto, AI, COVID... HN commentators, by contrast, were wrong about everything that mattered.

I lost most of my respect for g...n when i noticed he he was one of those IQ guys

What does that mean? People who believe in IQ?

They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.

It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them, because the expected value of listening to them is negative.

It means I shouldn't listen to them in general. The LessWrongers are mainly wrong about things they think they understand: when they aren't overconfident, their improvisational skills tend to be decent. They were an excellent source of information about COVID-19, but they're a terrible source of information in the areas where they think they have expertise.

When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it might be very useful, and it's pretty easy to tell: you just check whether it looks like they're doing science, or Rationalism™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.

> most of them are eugenicists.

[citation needed]

Covered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...

Rationalists were talking about AI decades before anyone else were talking about it. They were also early on COVID and crypto. They are only "aggressively wrong" about "everything" if you are, ironically, not thinking rationally about it.