Rationalists As People Who Build Piles Of Rocks

I recently attended the LessOnline event at the LightHaven campus.

It was fantastic, and I’ve got plenty of posts coming down the pipeline sparked by conversations or sessions held during the event. I got to meet a lot of my own personal heroes.

It was great.

Something that kept coming up throughout the event, in my mind, was the question: what is a rationalist? Who are we, and how are we identified? Anthropologically, sociologically, and so forth: what distinguishes us from other groups?

It was during a discussion around an outdoor heater (off at the time), the California sun shining through the triangle-shades hung all over the campus, that I finally figured it out.

You see, there were many different clusters of people at the event. There were the creative writers, the hardcore scientists, the AI people, the sex researchers, the CFAR people, and so on.

But as I sat at that outdoor heater, I noticed something.

The heater was full of stones, no doubt used as thermal mass: when the temperature cooled off at night (and wow did it get cold), the stones would help to soak up the heat coming from the heating element and radiate said heat outwards.

But during the conversation I noticed that amongst this uneven pile of porous rock was a small pile of stones. A tower, if you will. One that had clearly been constructed: it used the shapes of the stones to achieve a maximum of height for a minimum of structural material.

And as the conversation went on about topics near and far, several of the other people in the conversation, apropos of nothing, started taking stones to make their own towers.

And while I didn’t do so, I certainly felt the desire to join them.

So this is my central conceit: Rationalist are people who, when they see a random pile of stones, will nonchalantly make a tower out of them.

Now, this does not uniquely identify rationalists, it’s true. I’m sure there are plenty of obsessive-compulsive rock-tower builders out there who wouldn’t fit in the group. But it’s a pretty good pointer to the cluster of idea-space that rationalism inhabits, and a fun metaphor to use.

Order From Chaos

When you read rationalist literature, you get a very clear sense that we consider ourselves descended from the Enlightenment, from the tradition of questioning the world around us that led to modern science. Francis Bacon is one of the key intellectual cornerstones of our history. We revere scientists and inventors, mathematicians and philosophers - the people who pushed thought forward, who brought the light of knowledge into the dark ignorance humanity labored under for so very many millennia.

And while there are many ways of saying it, of unifying these different fields into a single cohesive whole, I like the idea of this grand project of enlightenment and science and rationality as the project of bringing order from chaos.

A pile of rocks all jumbled together in a heating element is a kind of chaos. It’s meaningless, without art or beauty or design. Just pieces of the universe sitting in a pile, not doing anything.

In a way, though, doesn’t that describe all reality without conscious choice? Electrons buzzing around nuclei in probabilistic clouds, atoms bonding with random partners, molecules twinning together in evolutionary processes whose only purpose is to perpetuate themselves, no more, no less.

Before humans got here, all matter on earth was just a bunch of metaphorical rocks, sitting around in a pile, not doing much of anything.

It’s humanity that looks at the jumble of stones and thinks, this could be a tower.

It’s humanity that builds towers that scrape the sky, that decodes genomes and remakes molecules and shatters atomic nuclei.

But it isn’t all of humanity that does these things.

Everyone seeks meaning in their life, but it’s a much smaller subset that seeks understanding, the knowledge necessary to take an unremarkable pile of stones and from it build a second Babel.

Of course, one does not have to build a literal, physical pile of stones.

Math is not made of such corporeal matter, after all.

But the metaphor stands: to do math (or philosophy, or creative writing, or…) is still to build order and structure and purpose and beauty from random and purposeless clay.

All the people at that conference, and indeed all the rationalists I know - they are people who, in their own small ways, build towers from the stones in front of them. And they do it reflexively, as a part of who they are.

Building A Tower Of The Mind

We rationalists aren’t the only ones who seek order and beauty and truth, of course. It would be arrogant to an absurd degree to think or claim otherwise.

So what else can we get from this metaphor, this tower-building that we do?

Rationalists believe in self-improvement, but it’s not just a flavor of pop-psychology growth mindset. We believe in the mind’s ability to perceive some - perhaps not all, but some - of its own flaws, and to, with conscious effort, correct them. We believe in admitting our mistakes loudly and proudly, saying: “This is how I have erred, and in admitting and accepting it, I have come to err less.”

We talk of Rationality as the The Way or The Art, a discipline that humans discover even as they create it, that surpasses any one of us. It is a path without end, a mountain with no peak. One can only walk the path, taking care where each foot is placed, stumbling towards greater knowledge and deeper mysteries.

Is that mastery, gained through research and experience, not the same as building a tower? If the pieces of knowledge that come before us are stones, are we not all engaged in the process of building a tower of our own out of them? Mortaring together the lessons of our predecessors and our own discoveries, in an effort to reach for higher truths?

Do we not see farther, by resting the foundations of our towers upon the shoulders of the giants who came before?

A Rationalist is always engaged in this tower-building, measuring out their maps to the territory and constantly adjusting the former as the latter is revealed. They’re always working with new ideas, new models, new thoughts, building their tower higher and seeing further.

The Tower Crumbles, But The Builder Remains

Rocks balanced on the edge of an outdoor heater will eventually tumble and fall. Maybe the wind knocks them over, maybe a groundskeeper sweeps them back into the pit with the other rocks.

Eventually, all things return to chaos. Ashes to ashes, and a meaningless pile of rocks to a meaningless pile of rocks.

But I have no doubt that someone else will come along to that heating element and, over the course of a different conversation, idly start building another tower.

We Rationalists have been wrong before. I have little doubt that we’ll be wrong again. I have no doubt that we’re importantly wrong about something right now.

Towers - of stones or ideas, of brick and mortar or mental models - come and go.

But the process of building remains.

In the story of the Tower of Babel, God scattered humanity to the four corners of the world for daring to build a Tower high enough to reach Him. He cursed us with different languages so we could never communicate well enough to build to such heights again.

God was right to be afraid.

We are the descendants of those builders, and we are still building to this day. We build spears of glass and steel that rise above the earth. We build machines that translate between languages so the barriers to cooperation are overcome one by one. And no matter how many times the towers we build in our mind are knocked down, no matter how many replication crises and paradigm shifts we have to go through, we still keep building towers.

Towers of art, of engineering, of understanding.

Towers of science and math and philosophy.

Towers of human effort and sacrifice, each of us adding stones to the effort until the day the tower scrapes divinity.

To be a Rationalist is to be a tower-builder. To bring forth structure from jumble and order from chaos. To scaffold the mind and its mysteries and climb to greater and greater heights of understanding.

And even when we fail - especially when we fail - always, when we fail - we get back up, and start building again.

That is who Rationalists are.