Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
Reflections on Rat Fest ’25
Rat Fest is an annual conference in Philadelphia. It’s centered around Karl Popper’s philosophy of Critical Rationalism (CR), particularly physicist David Deutsch’s version of it. (‘Rat’ is short for ‘rationalism’ – critical rationalists commonly call themselves ‘crit rats’.) Conjecture Institute, led by Logan Chipkin, Aaron Stupple, and David Kedmey, hosted the three-day conference. Logan is a good friend of mine who has authored and co-authored articles on this blog. Aaron – whose book The Sovereign Child I recommend – is a friend as well, and also a client.
I just attended the conference for the first time this past weekend. Here’s what I learned.
I have a newfound appreciation for in-person meetups. I had previously undervalued them. Although I still believe that serious truth-seeking happens in writing, there’s always going to be a personal aspect to any rational undertaking that involves two or more people. It’s important to “remember the human”, as Reddit says. Shaking someone’s hand, looking them in the eye, and sharing a meal all have a special quality that you just don’t get digitally. I’ve been online friends with many attendees from the CR space for years, but it was great to finally meet in person. Once established, a personal connection can open the door to certain criticisms, and thus a growth of knowledge that would otherwise have been impossible or at least hard to get: a friend is more receptive to criticism than a stranger.
Each day, several attendees gave ten-minute talks on various topics ranging from epistemology to politics to biology and neuroscience. I enjoyed two talks in particular. One was Sam Kuyper’s talk ‘David vs Goliath: On the Benefits of Being Small’. As I recall, he argued that small teams often have more agility than large companies. The limiting factor in any undertaking is ultimately knowledge, not size or funding. The other was Tom Hyde’s presentation titled ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty’, which taught me the difference between art, beauty, and aesthetics. During one of the many lively discussions in smaller groups after dinner one night, Tom explained to me that what you see when looking up from the base of a skyscraper is not beautiful but sublime. In addition, he and I agree that bodybuilding is art. I also enjoyed my discussions with Lucas Smalldon, whose talk about a problem with the correspondence theory of truth I unfortunately missed. So it’s a good thing he wrote a follow-up.
Writer and skeptic Michael Shermer was a remote guest speaker on the topic of ‘Moral Progress’. Brett Hall, a CR podcaster who has made Deutsch’s work more accessible to many, also gave a remote guest lecture, titled ‘AI and the Philosophy of Science’, which expertly addressed and debunked all the common AI doomsday arguments. No doubt, Deutsch’s remote appearance for a final, hour-long Q&A session on the last day was a highlight for many attendees.
My own talk, ‘Reason by Purge or by Patch?’, was on the second day. It was based on my article by the same title. I want to figure out how to live a life that is 100% guided by reason, and I think I’ve identified a conflict between Critical Rationalism and Objectivism that needs to be resolved to achieve that. In short, CR says that improvements in any knowledge-laden system are necessarily gradual and piecemeal, and ideally reversible. Knowledge grows through evolution. Don’t try revolutions: you will end up in a much worse place than where you started. You risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now, I think gradual improvement is all well and good if you want to get better at a skill like playing the piano, say. But Objectivism rightly points out that basic principles have an all-or-nothing character. Any compromises between truth and falsehood, good and evil, reason and unreason, any ‘mixed premises’, as objectivists call them, automatically favor vice and undercut virtue. “What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while?”, asks the founder of objectivism, Ayn Rand (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 161). Clearly, someone who steals once in a while is better than a full-on kleptomaniac, but in order to be honest, you can’t steal at all. However, if an occasional thief tried to purge his dishonesty and go to 100% honesty in one fell swoop, that would be revolutionary, and he might relapse into a worse state than before.
Applying this insight about honesty to rationality, I think most people are in the occasional thief’s position and don’t know it. In Rand’s words, they are rational, except when they don’t feel like it. How can they become fully rational? How can they achieve a state where they never feel like being irrational? I believe this is one of the problems of our age, and I’m not aware of any satisfactory answers. So, in the Popperian tradition, I presented the problem to the audience, taking care to point out that I do not wish to present myself as this exclusively rational guy who has figured all this out already. On the contrary, I do not know a solution, and I badly want one. (So far, my best attempt is my site Veritula.)
Only days prior, Tom Hyde had retweeted Francisco Goya’s 1799 aquatint ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’. It perfectly captures the problem at the heart of my talk, and Tom agreed that I could use it for one of my slides:
‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ by Francisco Goya - FAF4YL0zP9cjHg at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, Link
Phrasing the issue in terms of this work of art, people are (metaphorically) tired and tempted to let their reason sleep. If only they realized that the cause of their fatigue is not reason but unreason; that sleep will make things worse! We can also phrase the issue in terms of Deutsch’s problem statement about static vs dynamic societies from his book The Beginning of Infinity, chapter 15, applied to individuals: how does one transition from a part static, part dynamic mind to a fully dynamic one? How do we survive this unstable in-between phase? Make no mistake, this really is a matter of life and death. If you want your life to be a beginning of infinity, you have to make an unwavering commitment to reason. You must learn to identify irrationality in all its forms – of which there are many – reject them all, and instead practice rationality – which has only one form. But how do you do that? Both Critical Rationalism and Objectivism provide useful pointers, but I’m not aware of any step-by-step guide with a proven track record.
During the Q&A session after my talk, Aaron suggested the following: yes, stealing only once in a while isn’t good enough, you’re still a full-on thief, but gradual improvements toward figuring out why you want to steal are possible. Once you’ve figured it out, address the root cause and you should be able to stop stealing at once. I suspect that, depending on the root cause, honesty, rationality, etc, still require practice and can’t be achieved overnight, but these are preliminary thoughts, and Aaron’s suggestion is worth exploring. Another potential solution involves an exception to Popper’s opposition to revolutions: contrary to political revolutions, scientific ones have a rational character because a new scientific theory retains most, if not all, of the good parts of its predecessor. The latter gets to live on in the former as a limiting case or approximation (see, eg, Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, p. 315 and Objective Knowledge, p. 269). Then again, what part of irrationality could be worth preserving? Presumably none.
Amaro Koberle questioned whether honesty was really something that could ever fully be achieved. He suggested that we can only ever be “fallibly honest”; that there is necessarily going to be at least some small degree of dishonesty in everyone. I disagree, but he is in good company: many people who consider themselves fallibilists (effectively another word for critical rationalists) are, in fact, what I call cynics. Contrary to Deutsch, they do not believe that problems are fully soluble; contrary to Popper, they do not believe that we can ever find the truth in any matter. They think all our ideas are false and flawed in some way. In reality, we can and often do speak the truth – we just don’t know when. There’s no criterion to distinguish with certainty between true and false statements, as Popper rightly pointed out – but, as he also said, many of our statements are true. And by that I mean: 100% The Truth, with zero pending errors or criticisms. You can fully solve a problem, be done with it, and then move on to the next problem. You should expect to make mistakes somewhere, but you don’t necessarily make mistakes everywhere.
The same is true for honesty and rationality. You can practice these things, correct mistakes relentlessly, and perfect them to the point where there are no errors left to fix. Think of legendary golfer Tiger Woods: at his skill level, there are just certain beginner errors that, as long as he keeps practicing, he will never make again. You can fully correct an error, where ‘fully’ means you never repeat it and it stays corrected. And then you can move on to an infinity of other problems waiting for you to solve them. Why would honesty and rationality be any different? Why would everyone be doomed to repeat the same mistakes no matter what they tried?
Throughout the rest of the weekend, several people approached me about my talk. After speaking with a few of them, I realized they all fell into one of two distinct camps. (This binary reflects the objectivist insight that no compromise between reason and unreason is possible.) The first, a minority, seemed not only freaked out by the necessity of choosing between reason and unreason, but also deeply worried about being bad people, and being judged as such, for not having chosen reason already. I’m not sure they realized how much they accidentally confessed by expressing their concern. One woman pulled me aside and talked to me under her breath, constantly scanning the room as if in a mild panic. It seemed like she sought license to be irrational and confirmation that she wasn’t a bad person for wanting to continue living with mixed premises. I could not give her the reassurance she wanted, but encouraged her to try reason. The second camp, a majority, was fired up and excited about the possibility of a life exclusively guided by reason. The second are obviously the kinds of people you (should) want to surround yourself with.
Not everyone agreed, of course. One night, on the hotel patio overlooking part of downtown Philadelphia, one attendee told me he liked rationality, sure, but religion was fine as long as it made people happy or gave them comfort. I asked him, what could be the value of happiness based on irrationality, on opposition to reality? What good is comfort in falsehood? When he struggled to find an answer, he instead offered a ‘don’t harsh my mellow’ kind of response and stated that he did not dislike rationality. When he didn’t see that his impartial attitude automatically favored unreason, I asked which side would quote him for support – reason or unreason? – and he agreed that it was unreason who would quote him. Well, at least he was honest.
As if to confirm the timeliness of my talk and the urgency of the problem I had presented, the next day, a speaker who shall remain nameless because I don’t want to give him a platform, suggested that the future belong to both rationality and religion. (He should have titled his talk, ‘How to Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too’.) Not only does the dominant philosophy of our age already advocate such a mixture, but he also didn’t notice his implicit admission that religion was irrational. He simultaneously contradicted himself by suggesting people could be more rational for being religious. (Then why phrase religion in opposition to rationality in the first place?) One audience member perked up and asked whether we could turn Critical Rationalism into a religion. Just when I thought all was lost, attendee and science writer John Horgan challenged the speaker, “What do we need religion for when we can just stick with rationality?” A sigh of relief: a voice of reason. Maybe my talk had made a difference after all.
I had many more discussions throughout Rat Fest that were interesting – too many to recount them all. In the end, I was impressed with how organized the conference was. Everything went without a hitch, and everyone was courteous and professional at all times. As president of Conjecture Institute, Logan Chipkin deserves special recognition for running the event so smoothly. He’s knowledgeable, he’s kind and genuine, and he’s Good People. Everyone was in great hands. I’m confident he’ll continue conquering the CR space, and I hope he makes a fortune.
One thing I’d like to see next year is the addition of panel discussions to the talks. Also, Logan announced that Rat Fest may be rebranded to ‘Conjecture Con’. I believe attendee Jesse Nichols came up with the new name. I like it. It sounds more serious; the alliteration has a nice ring to it. The new name would be instantly recognizable and more clearly connected to Conjecture Institute.
I recommend that anyone interested in philosophy and rationality attend Rat Fest/Conjecture Con in 2026.
References
This post makes 10 references to:
- Post ‘Bodybuilding as Art’
- Post ‘Don’t Take Fallibilism Too Far’
- Post ‘Error Prevention: Error Correction’s Forgotten Brother’
- Post ‘Fun Criterion vs Whim Worship’
- Post ‘Libertarian FAQ’
- Post ‘My Honest Review of The Sovereign Child’
- Post ‘Reason by Purge or by Patch?’
- Post ‘Starting Over’
- Post ‘Three Revolutionary Ideas’
- Comment #3754 on post ‘Reason by Purge or by Patch?’
There is 1 reference to this post in:
- Comment #3766 on post ‘Fun Criterion vs Whim Worship’
What people are saying
Dennis: "a speaker who shall remain nameless because I don’t want to give him a platform"
Is that honestly the reason?
Dennis: "... He should have titled his talk, ‘How to Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too’ ... he also didn’t notice his implicit admission that religion was irrational. He simultaneously contradicted himself by suggesting people could be more rational for being religious."
These say the same thing in different ways. That thing depends entirely on your account of religion.
Dennis: "what could be the value of happiness based on irrationality, on opposition to reality? What good is comfort in falsehood?"
Judging from these statements, your account of religion is that it is essentially irrationality and falsehood. Assuming this account, the thing you're saying above makes sense. But how rational and true is this account of religion?
Dennis: "Then why phrase religion in opposition to rationality in the first place?"
Maybe he didn't intend to phrase them in opposition. Maybe you imposed that interpretation on his account of religion, reflecting your account of religion.
John: "What do we need religion for when we can just stick with rationality?"
This is a slightly better question. A yet better question would not imply, before even presenting itself as a genuine question, that needing religion could not be part of just sticking with rationality.
Dennis: "a voice of reason"
Nominally. But really?
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By the way, what is the epistemic status of a reasonable man who makes poor assumptions once in a while?
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Yes. And starting a conversation with an implicit accusation of dishonesty is not a good move.
I didn’t make poor assumptions. I’ve studied irrationality. I know a clown when I see one.
But okay, do you have any new arguments, some reasoning why this proposed unification of rationality and religion would work, maybe even a refutation of Rand’s work on the incompatibility of reason and unreason and the impossibility of compromising on fundamental matters?
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Rejection of all religion may be a Shibboleth of your organisation, but it's not necessarily entirely Popperian to do so. Popper does not critique ideas on the basis of their source, which is another way to object to ad-hominem attacks. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
But isn't the fundamentalist atheist version, rejecting any concept of intelligence outside the universe, or intelligence of a nature of which we can't conceive just another "faith" - being "the assurance we feel about what we can't verify"? And isn't the concept of a "simulation" now becoming more popular? This is nothing more than Deism, to expect that the intelligence we experience is not limited to the context we can conceive.
Given the mixed nature of determinist and non-deterministic causation we all seek to unravel with CR, this leads us to the conjecture that "Causation is a feature of the Simulation". That is, the universe shows evidence of mathematical design. That can't just be written off by CR as a Shibboleth, but at least should be respected as a conjecture to be considered as not yet refuted.
So Popperian and Deutchian CR to me has to remain ever uncertain. We then construct our lives on the basis of what Adler called a "lifestyle" - a collection of unstated and stated beliefs and goals. Continually critiquing this is the real basis towards personal growth and wisdom, not continuing to search for evidence for pre-conceived positions.
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I don’t belong to any organization. I don’t know what organization you’re thinking of.
I don’t reject religion as a source. I (try to) reject unreason. Religion is a form of unreason because it refers to the supernatural, the inexplicable, and other mystical concepts. It is nonsensical on its face and doesn’t stand up to very basic criticism. Rejecting unreason is Popperian. Rejecting faith is not another form of faith, no. The concept of a simulation is becoming popular, yes, but as Deutsch has pointed out, it’s just a restatement of a belief in the supernatural and should be rejected on those grounds alone.
All knowledge is ultimately uncertain (in the sense that there is no criterion of truth), but this Popperian insight is not a defense of relativism, ie it doesn’t mean that we should treat unreason as an equal of reason or that religion has any validity or that all ideas are equally valid. They are not.
Religion is one of the deepest cesspools of so-called ‘thought’. Just the other day, Jordan Peterson’s daughter tweeted about him and other family members being sick due to a series of “spiritual” attacks. It’s like she still lives in the dark ages. What is wrong with people?
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Surely, to "reject faith" is to assert certainty of what is unknowable? How do you define rationality as giving such certainty on the cause of the big bang? Surely you put your faith in future rationalists working this out?
In terms of "cesspool of thought" - prior to "an eye for an eye" it was "you stole my goat so I will kill you and your children". As the ongoing thought in scripture developed, with restraint on revenge later in OT and 'loving your enemies' in the NT, this gave birth to social technologies and values that undergird today's world. In Roman and most other non-Christian societies, the equal value and equal right of every human was not "self-evident" as the founders of the USA asserted.
What is more "self-evident" in countries not undergirded by Christianity is that different humans are worth different values. Consider the Islamic alternative to the UDHR ("Cairo Declaration"), or the more rational "Party-defined meritocracy" state in China
How will you take care that your vituperation does not end in the "irrationality" of human rights from the post-Christian world being replaced with something more rational from other competing world views? Just because something seem "rational" to you does not make it universal.
And yes I looked up Mikhalia Peterson's post and don't share her views.
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No. Faith means not questioning or criticizing something. So to reject faith means to question/criticize. That should answer your other questions from the same paragraph.
You shouldn’t love your enemies. That’s altruist nonsense. And what gave birth to the improvements in the West was the ingenuity of inventors and their desire to improve their lives and pursue their interests against overwhelming cultural pressures to just fit in and not ruffle too many features, most notably exerted by the church. It was ultimately a tradition of criticism that enabled progress, as Popper explains. That includes the emergence of human rights (as opposed to the many crimes against humanity the church and other religious organizations perpetrated). This tradition of criticism stands in opposition to faith. But that doesn’t stop religious people from taking credit for that tradition’s achievements. (This is a pattern in mixed systems, like governments routinely taking credit for the achievements of the free market: “Bush’s administration created x jobs…”)
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Dennis: "starting a conversation with an implicit accusation of dishonesty is not a good move"
I didn't start the conversation. You started it with publication of poor assumptions, despite your apparent higher than average intelligence, which gives me reason to question your motives. It's a good move, if "good" is understood as warranted.
Dennis: "I didn’t make poor assumptions."
Oh. But you did. Insistence to the contrary doesn't change reality.
Dennis: "I’ve studied irrationality. I know a clown when I see one."
Maybe you do sometimes. Clearly, at least sometimes, you also project clowns, reflecting your poor assumptions.
Dennis: "do you have any new arguments, some reasoning why this proposed unification of rationality and religion would work"
Superficially, it's easy. Position the religious phenomenon as an expression of rationality, whether or not particular expressions of that phenomenon are rational in themselves. The harder work begins there.
Dennis: "maybe even a refutation of Rand’s work on the incompatibility of reason and unreason"
That request is like asking for a refutation of the incompatibility of X and not-X. It's incoherent and uninteresting. But, here, that request is also obfuscation and misdirection. It's a sleight of hand, intended to establish religion as "unreason," thereby assuming your conclusion.
Dennis: "maybe even a refutation of Rand’s work on ... the impossibility of compromising on fundamental matters"
If the fundamental matter in question is the law of non-contradiction, no coherent refutation is possible. If the fundamental matter in question is the moral status of a person who lies, or the epistemic status of a person who makes poor assumptions, much compromise is possible -- even practically necessary, despite whatever noise dogmatists make to the contrary.
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Yes you did. You were the first to leave a comment. I didn’t reach out to you. You came to my blog with a lot of negative energy. Then you made more accusations in your next comment and doubled down with more implicit accusations and even insults.
If your goal was to get me to give the speaker’s claims a second chance, you’ve achieved the opposite. Take care.
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I really can't let this stand. You said: "Faith means not questioning or criticizing something. So to reject faith means to question/criticize".
That is the opposite of the clear definition of faith in scripture. It is, as I said, "the assurance you feel about what you cannot verify". (Heb 11:1). The Bible points to truth outside of itself and encourages verificationism.
I concur with "new atheism"'s asssertion that some Christians do adopt beliefs against evidence, but this is an emergent sociological phenomenon, not in accordance with Scripture nor mainstream Christian thought. If atheists were of good will, they would point out that such fundamentalism is not in accordance with their holy book, rather than denying what scripture actually says.
People of good will do not mis-represent the arguments of others. Arguing against a strawman is supposed to be beneath Critical Rationalists.
You may think you epsitemology is somehow unassailable, but really it's not. There are more sophisticated and stronger epistemologies out there that build beyond Popper, synthesise Kuhn's sociological critiques, think Lakatos, or even Feyerabend's almost cynical view holds in my view a small grain of truth. Look up "New Matrix Epistemology" to find how different disciplines use different truth-seeking processes and how they can learn from each other.
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You forgot to quote the parts of scripture that threaten people for disobedience:
Mark 16:16 – “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Matthew 12:31–32 – Jesus says blasphemy against the Holy Spirit “will not be forgiven.”
Revelation 22:18–19 – “If anyone adds to [this book’s] words, God will add to him the plagues… if anyone takes away from the words… God will take away his share in the tree of life.”
(These results are from ChatGPT but I did verify them.)
And what was that little thing about being punished for eating from the tree of knowledge?
But let me guess, those passages don’t count or shouldn’t be taken literally, for some convenient reason.
It’s exactly as I said in the main post, religious people want to have their cake and eat it, too. You can live your life like that, aiming for the impossible; that’s your prerogative. Just don’t pretend this has anything to do with rationality when clearly it does not.
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I forgot to mention in the main article: somebody at RF suggested I start a movement called ‘Hackethalism’. I rather like that name, especially because it sounds similar to ‘catholicism’ (the ‘kethal’ in ‘Hackethal’ is pronounced the same as ‘cathol’).
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