If Scott Alexander Told Me to Jump off a Bridge...

The end of tooth decay, and rationalism as a source of community and guidance

Yesterday, I let some genetically engineered bacteria colonize my mouth, which I give maybe a 50% chance of protecting me from tooth decay for the rest of my life. If you want to try it yourself, I hope you follow this link so I can get $10. But this isn’t just a way to make money, as I have now used the product, and proved it by live-streaming the whole process including my cavity check and teeth cleaning right before application.

Lumina does not have FDA approval, the endorsement of major scientific organizations, or any of the other trappings that sound medicine is supposed to have. So why did I do this? You might expect me to say that being the independent-minded free thinker that I am, I read the underlying science and came to the conclusion that this was a good idea. But that’s not what happened. I don’t even remember the name of the guy who came up with the concept. I think it’s Hillman?

The real reason I brushed my teeth with Lumina was Scott Alexander told me to (see also Cremieux). I’ve read him for years on a wide variety of topics, and to say that I find him trustworthy would be an extreme understatement. He’ll often be making an argument, I’ll think of an objection, and before I’ve even fully developed it he will bring up the same point and then generally deal with it in a way that I find satisfactory. When he doesn’t understand something, he tells us, and then lets us decide how much that causes problems for different aspects of his argument. This is not like reading most people, where they’ve got an already accepted conclusion that they want to arrive at due to reasons of laziness, conformity, or ideological commitment, and you can observe the shortcuts they take to get there in real time. If you’re a normie, you probably notice when people who disagree with you do this, but not those who agree.

My bald headed intellectual lodestar

If Scott says there’s a good chance this works, he’s looked at the relevant literature. Each medical product without FDA approval is going to of course have a story to tell about why it doesn’t have it, and Scott assures us that in this case theirs make sense, and fits with what we know more generally about how truly awful the FDA is. He’s also the kind of guy who considers tail-end risks, and Scott doesn’t seem to believe they’re substantial in this case. Each one of these questions, and others relevant to whether one should use Lumina, require some judgment, as does how we ultimately balance potential risks and rewards. There are only a handful of people whose thinking on all this I would take as a replacement for my own, sure to be close enough to what I would come up with if I actually took the time to look into the issue myself. Scott is near the top of that list.

Scott Alexander is not just an individual, but an institution. I also like reading his commenters, along with their entries in his book review competitions. The style, tone, and mode of thought that they bring occasionally make me forget that I’m reading one of Scott’s commenters rather than the man himself. He’s a focal point for rational people across the globe, and by modeling intellectual humility and good epistemological habits is hopefully creating more of them.

It’s easy to be cynical about a group of people who call themselves “rationalists.” Who are these goofballs with funny shoes to harken back to the naive early days of the Enlightenment and pretend that they are the ones who finally have it figured out? As soon as man started to think for himself, we saw the horrors of the French Revolution, and over a century later “dialectical materialism” led to mass genocide and grinding poverty. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we all somehow regained faith in rationality and progress anyway, but then the internet came along and made everyone cynical and depressed, not least about the reasoning capabilities of our fellow humans.

The culture of dissent on social media has made those paying attention distrustful towards academia, the FDA, and the rest of what we conventionally call the establishment. But we’ve also seen their critics — MAGAs, tankies, the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Putinists and other kinds of third world fetishists, etc — and realized that they’re no less crazy, just less powerful. Go and listen to Bret Weinstein for a few minutes, and you should feel overwhelming gratitude over the fact that although he might have a million followers on X, we live in the kind of society where no one in power is taking his ideas seriously.

And yet… logic does exist! As chaotic as it may be, society can be legible. Yes, few people have done it correctly. But that is more a failure of the vast majority of humans than it is the fault of rationality itself. No one told you that just because the American Academy of Pediatrics says that kindergarteners can choose their sex, you had to go and lie about the successes of mRNA vaccines or make excuses for those who do.

There are people out there who can, without a sense of irony or shame, claim the mantle of rationality. They usually don’t identify with one side of the political spectrum or the other. Why would you expect them to? Political tribes are formed on the basis of collective interests and mass psychological sentiment, not what is true. You shouldn’t expect all the truth to be on one side, even if you also might not expect our two major tribes to be equally balanced.

I’m in a shared project with the American conservative movement. I think they’re often stupid and hateful, but they just happen to include in their coalition the pro-market people, who get the most important and fundamental thing right. In part they’re right for the wrong reasons, as most conservatives today don’t particularly like freedom, but just happen to hate the elites who want to control everything. So the right gives us pro-market types a seat at the table and defers to us on the things we prioritize because they don’t care about economics and are busy focusing on the Chinese buying farmland or whatever other retarded cause has gotten their attention this week. But I’m not going to go through the humiliating ritual of pretending that Trump did not actually try to overthrow the government in 2020 or putting forth a non-sequitur and changing the topic to BLM when asked about the topic. I’m also not buying any of their supplements, and if they enthusiastically endorse a new product it’s probably a negative signal.

This is how you know I’m not just using “rationalist” to mean people who are on my side politically. Very few rationalists will be hoping Republicans take the Senate in 2024, and I think that this is in part because they assume that Democrats being smarter and more secular than their opponents means that they’re more logical on important topics. In my opinion, this is not a crazy way to think, but it fails in this case, and overlooks the extent to which the left is captured by interest groups hostile to progress. Being a rationalist does not mean being right about everything, only that you avoid the truly stupid stuff and the most blatant kinds of hypocrisies and contradictions in one’s worldview. I don’t know who Scott Alexander is voting for this year, if he votes at all, but I’m pretty confident it’s not going to be Trump. The question of which party to support in American politics, given the combination of good and bad that exists on each side, is not the same as questions like whether vaccines work, if heredity is important, whether we invest in too much schooling, etc. While the American conservative movement is my tribe in the sense that I hope it conquers its enemies, I know I will never ultimately feel intellectually connected to it in the way that I do to those in the rationalist space.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who used Lumina on the recommendation of Scott Alexander. If I had a 1980s sitcom mom sitting next to me here, she might ask “If Scott Alexander told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that too?” To which I’d respond probably not, but I would spend some time considering the possibility that I had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the laws of gravity. If he tells me something slightly more credible, like brushing my teeth once may eliminate tooth decay forever, I’m doing it.

One can’t get rid of tribal feelings completely, and arguably we shouldn’t want to. A healthy version of tribalism doesn’t revolve around things like race, sex, or how the two major parties in a country happen to be organized. Rather, it is ideally about shared purpose, philosophy of life, and orientations towards the world and how it works. Among the rationalist tribe, we tend to believe that credentialism and the naturalistic fallacy are two of humanity’s greatest enemies. I’ll admit, this means I like the idea of permanently changing my oral microbiome with something that is genetically engineered and doesn’t have FDA approval. Simply relying on official pronouncements and the ick factor when deciding what to do in life might be the best a stupid person or one with bad epistemological habits can hope for. But a few of us can do much better, whether we are conducting the research on a topic ourselves or relying on those we trust.

TracingWoodgrains has critiqued Scott Alexander for having the potential to be a prophet but never taking that step. I think what this gets wrong is that it lacks an appreciation of the benefits of standing above the fray. If Scott spent his days networking, commenting on legislation, and doing whatever else people are supposed to do when building a movement, when would he have time to do research on tooth decay, or whatever happens to catch his interest next? Blogging is sometimes what academia is supposed to be but almost never is — a career that provides the freedom to follow one’s true interests and search for truth, wherever it may lead. Scott probably isn’t the only person who I would’ve listened to on Lumina. Trace himself is among the trustworthy. But no one matches Scott in terms of the quality, importance, and breadth of his work.

We have enough politicos, nonprofits, and organized intellectual movements. Some of them are even worth supporting! But society needs oracles too, and ways to give comfort to those of us who are always going to feel alienated from all movements that have enough mass appeal to succeed in the real world as we hold our noses and ally with some of them anyway. Maybe this new strain of S mutans won’t ensure I never get a cavity again. Perhaps in five years horns will grow out of my mouth. Even rationalists can be wrong, and we may all be lemmings marching off a cliff here. But life is impossible without a willingness to take calculated risks, and close to unbearable when you feel like you’re the only sane person on this planet. For reasons practical and emotional, I hope Scott Alexander keeps writing for as long as possible.