Call Them Rationalists

I.

Last week I had dinner with Lemony Snicket. I didn’t realize who I was sitting with at the time, and said very little to him that night. But another writer at that table gave me some advice I had already known (which only further cemented it as advice worth taking). He’d just returned from South Africa, where he had interviewed a certain Nobel Laureate, and had stopped in San Francisco to give a reading. He was exhausted, and the advice came out in an offhand, casual way, after I told him about the residency I was attending. His advice was this: to write down everything. Especially if you are in a strange place.

I am in a strange place.

But I am also strange myself, and often feel like an alien. My father is a mathematician (a field where strangeness is a boon), and I majored in mathematics as well. But a serious illness derailed my life and forced me to look closely at what I actually wanted to do with the time left to me. I saw the books I had read and loved so deeply, the books that settled somewhere into my soul and never left, and knew I wanted to create something like them. To write, if possible, a beautiful novel. It would, I knew, take years of reading and writing and learning. It has been ten years since that day. Tens of thousands of people have read my fiction, I’ve published a short story, and I’ve attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference twice. And now I am at a writing residency called Inkhaven in Berkeley. And I am thinking about the advice that exhausted writer gave me.

I want to write down everything, but when it comes to using what I have written, I also want to honor the people I write about. Many of the people here are neurodivergent, and in no small way, so am I. Part of what I mean by honor is that my late younger brother had schizophrenia and I saw how easy it was for the world to see him as different and therefore unworthy of their time. He was ignored, isolated, and excluded.

I don’t want to make the mistake of failing to see the humanity in people.

II.

If I ever do write about this place and the people here, I hope to do a better job than Sam Frank. I spent some time today reading and rereading his 2015 article Come With Us If You Want To Live. It’s about what the writer terms “the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley,” though a better term for many of the people he writes about is really the Rationalist community. His article is widely derided around here, and I can understand why. Any writer who walks into a subculture to write about it for a wider audience will necessarily risk the opprobrium of the people in that subculture. Some of that, I think, is deserved. He has a tendency to other the rationalists he writes about. It shows up most saliently in his physical descriptions. It appears elsewhere, though it’s subtle. I just can’t get over the feeling that he’s making fun of them.

I am writing from Lighthaven, which is a Rationalist event center the writer visits in the article. I don’t consider myself a Rationalist; I’m just a Jewish guy who fell in love with The Great Gatsby. And I am less interested in arguing for or against Sam Frank’s article as an accurate capture of the Rationalist community, than in looking at how he used his personal experience to gain his reader’s trust. How fast he succeeded in his article. And how he infused his own personal background into his article to reinforce that trust.

So how does Sam Frank do all that?

By first sharing one of the formative stories of his life when he was still young and idealistic: his participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011.

I had gone to socialist summer camp; I had spent hopeless months writing utopian fiction in the first-person plural. So, that October afternoon, I was curious and skeptical.

When I first read these lines I saw a writer sharing a part of himself. It’s a vulnerable thing to do, even if he’s lightly making fun of himself, almost caricaturing who he was as a teenager. After months of protesting he recalls:

For the first time in my adult life, something seemed to be at stake and available to anyone: how to self-organize, how to be wholly democratic, what politics meant without parties, what mutual aid and direct action could and could not accomplish, what another world might be.

I saw here a bright and honest observer. There is a beautiful dream he is sharing here, even if he can’t quite articulate exactly what it is. He knows which direction this better world lies, many of us do, and everything that follows is his attempt to better understand the ideas that might lead to that world.

He shows us his journey into the Rationalist community, from a Tumblr page to Less Wrong to hearing Ray Kurzweil speak to meeting Michael Vassar, who tells him about the Singularity Institute (now MIRI) and its otherworldly founder Eliezer Yudkowsky. One month later he is headed to Berkeley to interview Eliezer.

He uses “the personal” to garner trust in his reader by establishing himself as someone who exists halfway between this world and their world. Even if a reader is psychologically and philosophically distant from the Rationalists, at least here is someone they can trust.

Which is why Sam Frank carefully chose his outfit for his meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky. He writes, “I had come costumed in a Fermat’s Last Theorem T-shirt, a summary of the proof on the front and a bibliography on the back, printed for the number-theory camp I had attended at fifteen.”

It might, however, have been too good of a costume.

He led me to an empty office where we sat down in mismatched chairs. He wore glasses, had a short, dark beard, and his heavy body seemed slightly alien to him. I asked what he was working on.

“Should I assume that your shirt is an accurate reflection of your abilities,” he asked, “and start blabbing math at you?” Eight minutes of probability and game theory followed.

Now it’s likely Yudkowsky saw right through his costume. But this only adds to the reader’s trust in the narrator. The narrator’s got a math background, and even he feels out of his league.

III.

There is more. I’m not even halfway through the article. But the examples are all of a kind. He encounters increasingly strange and esoteric ideas. Some of them are bad. Others, without further explication, sound like psychobabble or the daydreams of a stoned teenager. A few are good, though he disagrees with how they should be implemented. Every now and then he’ll point out the ill-fitting jacket or bad posture of someone. He knows when to define a term, when to expand on an idea, when to share the biography of a person. In short, he knows how to step out of the frame so we can see the subject clearly. Or clear enough, anyway. In truth, everything is seen through his eyes, chosen by him, or an editor. The trust he’s created between writer and reader requires him absenting himself from his writing every now and then. And he’s only able to hold himself back for so long.

He has been building up to it for the entire article, and finally states it plainly near the end. He writes,

If Thiel and his peers believe too much in the power of an elite, Ethereum offers an answer: an opt-in system of organizing human behavior with rules that can be made radically egalitarian.

This marries his dream of ‘politics without parties’ with the technology, it seems, he has been chasing for years. Though he has his reservations and states them clearly in an interview of the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.

The belief that math, perfect information, and market mechanisms would solve the problem of politics seemed naïve, I said to Buterin. Sure, he said, but what was really naïve was trusting corruptible humans and opaque institutions with concentrated power. Better to formalize our values forthrightly in code. “On some level, everything is a market, even if you have a system that’s fully controlled by people in some fashion. You have a number of agents that are following specific rules, except that the rules of the system are enforced by the laws of physics instead of the laws of cryptography.”

IV.

Let’s imagine what his piece could have been. It could have had no personal background in it at all. It could have been written from an authorial distance, like a historian describing the life of an ancient Athenian citizen. Instead we get a close on-the-ground look at a community, as seen through the eyes of someone deeply interested in it. And because he created trust with his readers in the first few paragraphs, it is easy to believe most of what he is writing, especially if this is your first time reading about the rationalist community. As he meets more and more Rationalists, they become almost less believable and more caricatured, until the only normality to hold onto becomes the author’s. He is our barometer for normality, our bellwether of sanity. While he doesn’t seem to believe the worldviews he encounters—in truth, he finds many of their ideas repellent—he is still ineluctably attracted to the sheer strangeness of their thinking. Even as he struggles to understand it.

He writes, “I browsed venal tech-trade publications, and tried and failed to read Less Wrong, which was written as if for aliens.”

I feel he is othering the writers of Less Wrong here, and Rationalists in general. He’s also making fun of them. I’ve been sitting here thinking about my brother, about all the mathematicians and scientists and philosophers and writers I’ve met. And I’ve finally decided, after recalling an anecdote from the Manhattan Project, that his comparison is more apt than he realizes.

Or as Leo Szilard once said:

The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars ... likely to have planets circling around them. ... The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. ... Yearning for fresh worlds ... they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. – “And so,” Fermi came to his overwhelming question, “if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?” – It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Rationalists.”