Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great

A brave, influential intra-community critique: 'extreme rationality' (formal LW-style training beyond ordinary science-literacy) shows little evidence of large practical benefits. Vladimir Nesov's call for success stories drew few practical ones; history shows no tendency for x-rationalists to win (the Korzybskians produced no genius surplus; ironically their one empire-builder was L. Ron Hubbard). Scott's diagnosis: akrasia is the limiting reagent (rational decisions are useless without willpower to execute), most people are already rational enough in Near Mode for practical matters (the pool-player who computes differential equations 'in the arm, not the head'), Newton was great while philosophically irrational, and plain noise (even fashion sense) rivals x-rationality's ~0.1 correlation with success. Pushes back hard on 'rationality is systematized winning' and the claim that rationality teachers must be worldly successes, and proposes a self-experiment in counting one's actually-x-rational decisions.

Quality 79 · Excellent. Low-Excellent. A clear, honest, and consequential challenge to the rationalist community's core value proposition that genuinely shaped its self-understanding; the akrasia-as-limiting-reagent and correlation-~0.1 points are sharp and have held up. Meatier than most posts in this batch. 79.

Claude’s paradigm shift 58 · Moderate. Moderate(-upper). A genuinely contrarian, novel-in-2009 intervention against the community's founding premise that rationality training reliably produces winning. 58.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. A brave intra-community critique (formal 'extreme rationality' shows little practical benefit; akrasia is the limiting reagent) that genuinely shaped the rationalist community's self-understanding. Conceptual influence within that movement, no material change — modest RWI.