Nornagest comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2009 05:16PM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 27 February 2009 03:10:57PM 4 points [-]

I've heard a story about a cat:

The cat sat sunning itself by the window for several hours. Then it got up and walked off. My roommate said "That's how we can tell a cat has complex inner life - apparently uncaused but decisive action."

Surely decisive action has more possible causes than social groups?

Comment author: Nornagest 13 December 2010 07:24:19PM *  1 point [-]

Seems the moral here is that humans already have a common internal mechanism for overturning belief systems that has nothing to do with rationality: outlining it completely would take me more research and probably enough space for a top-level post (it hasn't been addressed directly as far as I can tell), but it's related to the cult attractor and you can see suggestions of how it works in conditions like Stockholm syndrome.

Being a lot more common over the set of all humans than having accurate intuitive access to a truly rational procedure for deciding between elements of belief systems, it makes sense to consider it a more likely cause for your own decisions in the absence of evidence for such a decision procedure.