Totally agree. It seems like a symptom of a larger issue: people are becoming increasingly selfish and entrenched in their own bubbles. It’s hard to see a path back to sanity from here.
This depends on the particular group of rationalists. An unfortunately outsized and vocal group with strong overlap in the tech community has gone to notions of quasi mathematical reasoning distorting things like EV ("expected value"). Many have stretched "reason" way past the breaking point to articles of faith but with a far more pernicious affect than traditional points of religious dogma that are at least more easily identifiable as "faith" due to their religious trappings.
Edit: See Roko's Basilisk as an example. wherein something like variation on Christian hell is independently reinvented for those not donating enough to bring about the coming superhuman AGI, who will therefore punish you- or the closest simulation it can spin up in VR if you're long gone- for all eternity. The infinite negative EV far outweighing any positive EV of doing more than subsist in poverty. Even managed to work in that it could be a reluctant, but otherwise benevolent super AI such that, while benevolent, it wanted to exist, and to maximize its chances it bound itself to a promise in the future to do these things as an incentive for people to get it to exist.
yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to the top, but societies in which people are willing to die for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any one-way time machines...).
I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the planet at that time would have burned you for being a witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the time.
