Annoyance comments on Striving to Accept - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2009 11:29PM

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Comment author: roland 10 March 2009 08:56:12PM *  0 points [-]

In order for fear of darkness to become ingrained it had to offer a fitness advantage to us otherwise the genes for that wouldn't be common. So, it increased your likelihood of survival, and if you value your life and health it is in fact rational. Keep in mind, that what fear really does is it heightens your alert levels and makes you focus much more attention on the environment(when the right conditions are met) then you would otherwise have done.

Btw. my definition of rational here is: whatever makes you win.

Comment author: Annoyance 10 March 2009 09:32:23PM 2 points [-]

"Btw. my definition of rational here is: whatever makes you win."

That's not a very useful definition. Aside from being purely Consequentialist, it means that we can't say whether a strategy is 'rational' unless we know whether it will work out, and that sort of knowledge is very difficult to acquire.