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1. According to the survey, only 13% of SSC commenters identify as rationalists. Almost none of the rationalists I know IRL comment on SSC. Saying \\u201crationalist community\\u201d when you mean \\u201cSSC comments section\\u201d or vice versa will leave everybody pretty confused.

2. Not every blog by a Christian is \\u201ca Christian blog\\u201d, and not every blog by a rationalist is \\u201ca rationalist blog\\u201d. I would hope blogs by Christians don\\u2019t go around praising Baal, and I try to have some minimum standards too, but I don\\u2019t want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special \\u201crationality\\u201d work beyond\\xa0showing people interesting problems.

3. Or consider the difference between a church picnic and a monastery. Both have their uses, and the church picnic will hopefully avoid praising Baal, but there\\u2019s a limit to how Christian!virtuous it can get without any structure or barriers to entry. A monastery can do much better by being more selective and carefully planned. Insofar as SSC makes any pretensions to being \\u201crationalist\\u201d, it\\u2019s a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.

4. Everything above applies to SSC\\u2019s engagement with effective altruism too, except 100x more.

5. I\\u2019ve been consistently skeptical of claims that rationality has much practical utility if you\\u2019re already pretty smart and have good intuitions and domain-specific knowledge. There might be exceptions for some domains too new or weird to have evolved good specific knowledge, or where the incentives are so skewed that the specific knowledge will optimize for signaling rather than truly good work (and maybe 99% of value is in domains like this, so maybe I\\u2019m not saying much). In any case, if rationality has much practical utility for your everyday life, you won\\u2019t find that practical utility here.