AdeleneDawner comments on The Wannabe Rational - Less Wrong
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I have other things to do with my evening, so I will probably not be responding to further posts on this thread until tomorrow, and I may not wind up getting back to this thread at all. If someone else would like to pick up the conversation, that's fine with me.
False dichotomy. There are definitely other options between considering all rationality subjective and requiring there to be one person who has all the answers. Many topics have been discussed here and elsewhere in the rationalist community and are considered resolved; our normal method is to use those as benchmarks.
Opening that question for discussion was a large part of the point of the original post; I expect it to be answered within the next few days. Also note that the question is context-specific: I'm only referring to the expected-rationality threshold here at Less Wrong.
Religion is one of the benchmarks, yes, and there are reasons for that. (No, I don't intend to discuss them; perhaps some of the other posters will give you relevant links if you ask.) As to how the passing of those benchmarks is judged, the whole group is involved in that by way of voting and discussion, and so far that appears to be a useful method that's less subject to bias than traditional forums with formal moderation.
We don't have a rationally-determined, uncontroversial method for determining priors, so that obviously won't be one of the benchmarks that we expect people to pass. Using Bayesian reasoning could be, though, or updating because of evidence regardless of the method.