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simplicio comments on A Challenge for LessWrong - Less Wrong
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The examples listed are not rational. They are examples of 'altruism' for the sake of a 'warm feeling' and signalling. Writing a letter, ringing a politician or giving blood are not actions that maximise your altruistic preferences!
You have responded to this 'Potential Objection' with the "better than nothing" argument but even with that in mind this is not about being rational. It is just a bunch of do-gooders exhorting each other to be more sacrificial. When we used to do this at church we would say it was about God... and premising on some of the accepted beliefs that may have been rational. But it definitely isn't here.
I make a call for a different response. I encourage people to resist the influence, suppress the irrational urge take actions that are neither optimal signals nor an optimal instrument for satisfying their altruistic values.
This isn't a religious community and 'rational' is not or should not be just the local jargon for 'anything asserted to be morally good'.
If my preferences were such that I valued eating babies then it would be rational for me to eat babies. Rational is not nice, good, altruistic or self sacrificial. It just is.
Maximize, no, but promote - yes. I concur with DSimon - if these are borderline useless, please suggest something better! (That was half the point of this post!)
Also, note that if I feel warm and fuzzy as a result of an action that promotes my goals, that is not a bad thing - on the contrary, you could make a pretty good argument that systematically ethical people are those who like doing ethical things.
I also (perhaps unfairly) assumed my audience would follow along easily enough in my slight equivocation between "ethical" and "rational."
Not unfair, just more wrong. This is human bias. We identify with the in group identity and associate all morality and even epistemic beliefs with it. It doesn't matter whether it is godly, spiritual, professional, scientific, spiritual, enlightened, democratic or economic. We'll take the concept and associate it with whatever we happen to think is good of or be approved of by our peers. People will call things 'godly' even when they violate explicit instructions in their 'Word of God'. Because 'godly' really means 'what the tribe morality says right now'. People make the same error in thought when they use 'rational' to mean 'be nice' or even 'believe what I say'. This is ironic enough to be amusing if not for the prevalence of the error.