Johnicholas comments on Taboo "rationality," please. - Less Wrong

23 Post author: MBlume 15 March 2009 10:44PM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 16 March 2009 03:00:44PM *  0 points [-]

I voted it down, and this is my reasoning:

  1. The post starts out by saying "me too". This is not helpful.
  2. The post admits that there's evidence of rationalization, and rather than reducing confidence in the conclusion, it merely reaffirms the original claim.
  3. The post throws very strong anthropic and singularity talk around incautiously and (in my opinion) inexpertly. These are controversial and nearly off-topic ideas, and discussion should admit the controversy and treat them cautiously.
Comment author: thomblake 16 March 2009 03:15:09PM 5 points [-]

  1. This point does not seem to degrade the comment.

  2. Rationalization is the standard method of generating explanations - first, one acts, then one comes up with a set of reasons why that happened, which are not necessarily causally related to the action. Wish I had a link to the relevant studies handy.

  3. it's ridiculous to expect a comment to even mention the controversy around the Singularity and the 'anthropic argument'. If you don't know what they are, then you can look them up in all their controversial glory. If you do, then you already know they're controversial. And if something is 'nearly off-topic' then by the definition of 'nearly' it's not off-topic, so I'm not sure what your point is there. And to find a singularity-fan in this crowd should not be a surprise to you; it's another perspective from which to approach the question, and it's clear that this is the perspective of the poster.

Comment deleted 16 March 2009 03:53:45PM *  [-]
Comment author: Johnicholas 16 March 2009 04:09:05PM *  3 points [-]

From About Less Wrong:

To prevent topic drift while this community blog is being established, please avoid mention of the following topics on Less Wrong until the end of April 2009:

  1. The Singularity
  2. Artificial General Intelligence
Comment author: Johnicholas 16 March 2009 04:57:53PM 1 point [-]

Nick Bostrom's introduction to the Doomsday Argument is an example of smart, cautious discussion of anthropic reasoning.

You should take the fact that the best argument that you can find for the proposition: "Rationality is optimal now, but it wasn't in 1950." is appealing to the Doomsday Argument, as evidence that your brain is in rationalization mode.

Comment deleted 16 March 2009 05:09:52PM [-]
Comment author: Johnicholas 16 March 2009 05:14:37PM *  1 point [-]

To falsify the conjunction "Rationality is optimal now" and "Rationality was not optimal previously", you only need to falsify one of the conjuncts. For example, "Rationality is not optimal now" or "Rationality was optimal previously".

EDIT: I said that awkwardly. To change your mind regarding "Rationality is optimal now and rationality was not optimal previously", you would have to change your mind regarding one of the conjuncts. For example, you could accept the statement "Rationality is not optimal now."

Robin Hanson has posted on the costs of rationality.

Comment deleted 16 March 2009 05:39:13PM *  [-]
Comment author: thomblake 16 March 2009 05:46:30PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, you're basically making the doomsday argument. Note that you could use the same reasoning about any question that you expect to come up from time to time, for instance "do I like cheese?"

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 March 2009 05:15:42PM *  0 points [-]

Are you asking an explanation for why anthropic reasoning is bunk?

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