我与理性主义者社区的决裂

背景与摘要

在本文中，作者深刻反思了自己对旧金山湾区理性主义运动逐渐幻灭的过程。文章追溯了从 20 世纪 90 年代初期的 Usenet 争论，到现代“理性主义者”（以 LessWrong 和有效利他主义为代表）的演变。作者指出，曾经追求智力严谨的社区逐渐沦为使用“动机推理”、傲慢且纵容有毒网络行为的地方。最终，作者解释了为何选择离开这个试图用逻辑和理性为自私结论辩护的群体。

Summary

在这篇反思性文章中，作者探讨了他们长期以来对公开批评旧金山湾区理性主义运动的犹豫不决。通过追溯互联网怀疑论者文化从 20 世纪 90 年代古怪的 Usenet 争论演变到现代理性主义（通过 LessWrong 和有效利他主义）的兴起，作者阐明了智力上的严谨性是如何频繁退化为动机推理、傲慢以及有毒的网络行为的。最终，这篇文章解释了为什么作者选择离开一个将逻辑武器化以证明其自私结论合理的社区。

In this reflective essay, the author explores their long-standing hesitation to publicly critique the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. Tracing the evolution of internet skeptic culture from the quirky Usenet debates of the 1990s to the rise of modern rationalism (via LessWrong and Effective Altruism), the author illustrates how intellectual rigor frequently devolved into motivated reasoning, arrogance, and toxic online behavior. Ultimately, the piece explains why the author chose to walk away from a community that weaponized logic to justify self-serving conclusions.

Introduction

这是一篇我抵制了很久才决定写的文章。在 2010 年代中期，即旧金山湾区理性主义运动的鼎盛时期，我没有痛下决心。在与理性主义结盟的金融家 Sam Bankman-Fried 被捕后，我抵制了这种冲动。而在 2025 年初爆发了涉及起源于同一社区的一个据称是性与谋杀邪教组织 (Zizians) 的丑闻之后，我更是强忍住一言不发。

This is an article I resisted writing for a long time. I didn’t pull the trigger in the mid-2010s, in the glory days of the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex-and-murder cult that originated from the same community.

我犹豫了这么久，部分原因在于理性主义运动有着非常出色的营销：如果你出言反对这种意识形态，听起来就像是你站在了非理性的一边。而且，仅仅因为偶尔出现的谋杀邪教就去谴责整个社区，这真的公平吗？你们中间谁是没有罪的，谁就可以先拿石头打他……

Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has brilliant marketing: if you speak against the ideology, it sounds like you’re siding with irrationality. And is it really fair to condemn the entire community just because of the occasional murder cult? He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…

不过，糟糕的笑话到此为止。今天，我想提供一个更个人的视角，谈谈我是如何卷入这场运动的早期形态的，以及为什么我早在所有那些所谓的谋杀事件发生之前，就已经对它充满警惕了。

But enough with bad jokes. Today, I wanted to offer a more personal perspective on how I got involved with the early form of the movement and why I’ve grown wary of it long before all the alleged murdering.

The Skeptic in You

如果你当时不在场，很难解释 20 世纪 90 年代的互联网有多么古怪。那是相距甚远的文化首次发生碰撞的时候。没有人卖东西，没有人买东西，也没有人赚大钱。那简直就是纯粹的雅科夫·斯米尔诺夫式的喜剧。

If you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain just how quirky the internet of the 1990s was. It’s when distant cultures made contact for the first time. No one was selling, no one was buying, no one was making big bucks. It was just pure Yakov Smirnoff comedy.

那时，建立网络的科学家和工程师们发现自己和“怪人”被关在同一个房间里——那些相信外星人绑架、大脚怪、永动机等事物的人。你可以想象，这些新来者抓住了机会，以最直接的方式挑战学术共识。

It’s when the scientists and engineers who built the network found themselves locked in the same room with “kooks” — those who believed in alien abductions, Bigfoot, perpetual motion, and so on. As you can imagine, these newcomers seized the opportunity to challenge the academic consensus in the most direct way possible.

随后在 Usenet 和网络论坛上爆发的争斗吸引了大量旁观者，并成为互联网最早的文化现象之一。当然，作为一个理性的人，你希望站在科学家这一边；至少，这似乎是明智之举。科学阵营——怀疑论者——有两位守护神：詹姆斯·兰迪 (James Randi)，一位转行调查超自然现象欺诈的魔术师；以及理查德·道金斯 (Richard Dawkins)，一位最初以反对教会而闻名的进化生物学家。

The resulting fights on Usenet and web forums attracted crowds of spectators and turned into one of the internet’s earliest cultural phenomena. Of course, as a rational person, you wanted to side with the scientists; if nothing else, it seemed like the winning move. The scientific camp — the skeptics — had two patron saints: James Randi, a magician turned investigator of paranormal fraud; and Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist originally known for speaking against the church.

随着怀疑论者社区的巩固，它开始转为进攻：我们以猎杀怪人为乐，并磨练我们的修辞技巧。我们对所有的逻辑谬误都倒背如流，并随时准备好了引用来源。这种感觉令人陶醉：你是房间里最聪明的人，能够只需一次外科手术般的反驳就能立刻羞辱任何地平论者。

As the skeptic community solidified, it started to play offense: we hunted cranks for sport and honed our rhetorical skills. We knew all the logical fallacies by heart and had citations at the ready. It felt intoxicating: you were the smart guy in the room, able to immediately humiliate any flat-earther with a single, surgical rebuke.

即便是那时，这种消遣有时也会变得很粗俗。我记得“时间立方” (Timecube) 事件；Timecube 是一个杂乱无章的意识流网站，充斥着离奇的宇宙学主张。它显然是由一个患有精神疾病的人建立的，但这并没有阻止社区在那里找乐子。这场闹剧在网站的所有者——一位老年人——被学生邀请去麻省理工学院和佐治亚理工学院录制“讲座”时达到了顶峰，目的仅仅是为了低级趣味。

Even back then, the pastime sometimes turned crass. I remember the Timecube affair; Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims. It was clearly put together by a mentally ill person, but that didn’t stop the community from having fun. The spectacle culminated in the site’s owner — an elderly man — being invited by students to give recorded “lectures” at MIT and Georgia Tech, simply for cheap laughs.

A More Potent Drug

到了 2000 年代末，书呆子们的社会经济地位开始发生变化。尽管流行文化仍然把我们描绘成无害的怪人，但许多技术人员觉得他们已经赢得了在成年人桌上的一席之地——并且凭借他们庞大的智力，他们对世界的看法是有分量的。

By the late 2000s, the socioeconomic status of nerds began to change. Although pop culture still portrayed us as harmless dorks, many techies felt that they earned a seat at the grownup table — and that by virtue of their vast intellect, their opinions about the world carried weight.

大约在那个时候，在尤其富裕的旧金山湾区，怀疑论者社区将自己重新包装为理性主义者，并围绕着诸如 Slate Star Codex 和 LessWrong 等网站聚集在一起。这个新社区较少关心仅仅对科学谬误做出反应；相反，他们主动寻找对于他们认为是我们这个时代最重要问题的“正确”答案。

Around that time, the skeptic community in the especially affluent SF Bay Area rebranded themselves as rationalists, coalescing around websites such as Slate Star Codex and LessWrong. This new community was less concerned with merely reacting to scientific falsehoods; instead, they proactively sought the “correct” answers to what they felt were the most consequential questions of our time.

当然，尽管强调理性——并含蓄地暗示群体外的人犯了更多错误——理性主义者社区也容易受到像其他人一样的偏见影响。首先，他们的分析几乎总是等于对他们喜欢的事物进行事后辩护。一个著名的例子是有效利他主义运动：它始于这样一个前提，即在慈善捐赠中，你应该最大化每一美元支出所产生的善意。由此，你可以争辩说，如果能最大化你的盈利潜力，那么为一家不道德的公司工作是没问题的——因为这样你就能通过你的捐款拯救更多生命。最后，今天造成的伤害可以被对尚未出生的后代所带来的好处抵消——这不知何故意味着为一家加密货币或 AI 初创公司工作是你所能做出的最合乎道德的选择。或者，正如另一位人士所言：有效利他主义者得出结论，他们能做的最慈善的事情就是给自己买一座城堡（字面意义上的）。

Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else. For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. A well-known example is the effective altruism movement: it started with the premise that in charitable giving, you should maximize the amount of good per dollar spent. From this, you could argue it’s okay to work for an unethical company if it maximizes your earning potential — and thus, saves more lives through the donations you make. And finally, the harms caused today could be offset by the benefits to generations yet unborn — which somehow meant that working for a cryptocurrency or AI startup was the most ethical choice you could make. Or, as someone else put it: effective altruists concluded that the most charitable thing they could do is to buy themselves a castle (literally).

偏见的另一个来源是，理性主义者在选择想要进行的辩论时必然是具有选择性的。在日常生活中，他们和普通人一样依赖直觉和轶事；但如果他们想争辩你的人生选择，他们会强行这么做，而且是打着寻求科学真理的幌子。这种行为非常普遍，甚至有了一个专有名词：海狮攻击 (sealioning)。

Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.

关于这一点，我记得 2017 年的詹姆斯·达莫尔 (James Damore) 事件——一位谷歌员工撰写了一份内部备忘录，认为性别之间存在根本差异，这使得女性对技术工作的兴趣较低。备忘录本身以及达莫尔先生随后的被解雇事件，在全国媒体上引起了轩然大波。鲜为人知的是，这份备忘录最初是被发送到 skeptics@google.com 邮件列表的，我也是该列表的一员。这是一种伪装成理性主义探究的个人信仰——还带着引用文献！——试图把所有人都卷入一场没人想要的职场争论。

On that note, I remember the 2017 affair of James Damore — a Googler who penned an internal memo arguing that there are fundamental differences between sexes that make women less interested in tech jobs. The memo itself, and Mr. Damore’s subsequent firing, made waves in the national media. What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry — with citations! — that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.

到那个时候，我与怀疑论者社区的关系已经很紧张了；在早先发给同一个邮件列表的一条消息中，我说过，尽管大家声称是开明的，但这里却是唯一一个仍然流行用石头砸死人的地方。即便如此，当我看到达莫尔的电子邮件时，我有一阵短暂的回复冲动。我想指责他“动机推理”——即为了推进某个特定结论而构建论证的所谓谬误，这与真正的理性主义者那种神圣的、无动机的推理形成了对比。

By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists.

我咬紧牙关，心里想，“哇，这游戏真蠢，”然后删除了草稿。

I bit my tongue, thought to myself, "Wow, what a stupid game to play," and deleted the draft.

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