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SforSingularity comments on Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
I have to say I'm surprised by the amount of praise this story is getting.
The main character seems convinced that the difficulty she experiences in interacting pleasantly with members of the opposite sex and possibly starting a relationship with someone less rational than she is, is due to her inability to delude herself, or even to compartmentalize.
But it's not. It's due to her inability to shut up once in a while. Instead of working on changing her entire psyche, couldn't she have simply made an effort to, you know, control the way she behaves?
Epistemic rationality has nothing to do with extreme honesty towards other individuals, or with showing contempt for irrationalists, or even with feeling contempt for them. The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth could have a happy relationship with a Young Earth Creationist; all s/he'd have to do is either refrain from criticism, or be very polite and gentle about it.
Also, I wasn't very impressed with the classification of Richard Dawkins (and those like him) as a "a Type-1-and-higher retard". What he is is a good Type-1-and-higher thinker who cares about the truth and therefore to whom avoiding self-deception is advantageous.
false in general, false as a statistical statement too.
The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth is still made out of meat.
I was making a point about human thought processes, not human desires. I agree that it's unlikely that the greatest epistemic rationalist would want to have a relationship with a YEC, but if s/he did want to, s/he could.
If I were otherwise unattached, I would totally have a relationship with a YEC, if she was from a world which had actually been created 6000 years ago. Otherwise no.
What if she was just from a world where lots of evidence pointed to it having been created 6,000 years ago, but it was really created last Thursday?
Is she hot?
...okay, that was a bit out of character, but I think that at that point in the thread I basically had no choice but to say that.
Unless you have actually tracked down and interviewed the greatest epistemic rationalist on earth, how do you know? Maybe (s)he is very tolerant of such things. (When does intolerance win on a personal scale?)
This sounds like scientism.
Because I have experience with good rationalists, and the kind of people they have relationships with, and I am a bayesian so I can assign degrees of belief to propositions that I haven't tested directly. In this case, it seems reasonable that similar people have similar relationship-behaviors, and so my existing knowledge is relevant.
Rather like "how do you know that the fastest dog in the world can't outrun a formula one car?" - I know this with high certainty because I believe that similar animals behave in similar ways.
If it is false they could not. What would prevent them?