"What do the rest of you think? Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value? If so, why? And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type?"
I've read through many of the posts on this site, but this is the first I've answered--the first I've felt knowledgeable enough to answer.
Generally speaking there might be a strong correlation--I've seen that pattern often (I'm currently in medical school, and in undergrad was the only LibAr in a houseful of engineers). There is, especially in the West, a dichotomy drawn very early and very deeply between imagination and knowledge--a belief that somehow they must be mutually exclusive. Even Einstein (who really ought to've known better, since his imagination was fundamental to his attainment of knowledge) emphasized the distinction ("Imagination is more important than knowledge"). Most forms of higher learning demand imagination and discipline; artistic creativity demands them as well, albeit in a different tenor.
I'm an artist, and my high valuation of knowledge (and growing valuation of rationality as a tool with which I can temper it) interlocks seamlessly with my desire to create. A greater understanding and integration of the world, more information, more finely honed perception--all of those things increase the quality of both my life and the things I create. This is as true of the areas of physics and mathematics and cellular biology as it is of English literature. Greater understanding produces better art.
It's doubtful that I'm a singular, or even rare, instance of such thinking; many of the Renaissance masters would probably agree. I've often wondered what Michelangelo might have produced if he'd somehow been able to share in Mr. Yudkowsky's beautifully elaborated HPMOR vision of humanity triumphantly ascendant over death and mourning; I suspect it would have outshone his 'David'. In fact, Mr. Yudkowsky's a great example of someone who feels no need to choose between artistic achievement and profound knowledge.
As to your question of preference...I can't choose. If I were offered one of the two, I'd seize each as eagerly as the other. And--like Goethe, Franklin, Khayyam, da Vinci, Pascal--if offered both...I'd choose them both.
In the comments on Soulless Morality, a few people mentioned contributing to humanity's knowledge as an ultimate value. I used to place a high value on this myself.
Now, though, I doubt whether making scientific advances would give me satisfaction on my deathbed. All you can do in science is discover something before someone else discovers it. (It's a lot like the race to the north pole, which struck me as stupid when I was a child; yet I never transferred that judgement to scientific races.) The short-term effects of your discovering something sooner might be good, and might not. The long-term effects are likely to be to bring about apocalypse a little sooner.
Art is different. There's not much downside to art. There are some exceptions - romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people. But artists seldom worry that their art might destroy the world. And if you write a great song, you've really contributed, because no one else would have written that song.
EDIT: What is above is instrumental talk. I find that, as I get older, science fails to satisfy me as much. I don't assign it the high intrinsic value I used to. But it's hard for me to tell whether this is really an intrinsic valuation, or the result of diminishing faith in its instrumental value.
I think that people who value rationality tend to place an unusually high value on knowledge. Rationality requires knowledge; but that gives knowledge only instrumental value. It doesn't (can't, by definition) justify giving knowledge intrinsic value.
What do the rest of you think? Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value? If so, why? And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type? (Pretend that great scientists and great artists are equally well-paid and sexually attractive.)
(I originally wrote this as over-valuing knowledge and under-valuing art, but Roko pointed out that that's incoherent.)
Under a theory that intrinsic and instrumental values are separate things, there's no reason why giving science a high instrumental value should correlate with giving it a high intrinsic value, or vice-versa. Yet the people here seem to be doing one of those things.
My theory is that we can't keep intrinsic and instrumental values separate from each other. We attach positive valences to both, and then operate on the positive valences. Or, we can't distinguish our intrinsic values from our instrumental values by introspection. (You may have noticed that I started using examples that refer to both intrinsic and instrumental values. I don't think I can separate them, except retrospectively; and with about as much accuracy as a courtroom witness asked to testify about an event that took place 20 years ago.)
It's tempting to mention friends and family in here too, as another competing fundamental value. But that would demand solving the relationship between personal values that you yourself take, and the valuations you would want a society or a singleton AI to make. That's too much to take on here. I want to talk just about intrinsic value given to science vs. art.
Oh, and saying science is an art is a dodge. You then have to say whether you value the knowledge, or the artistic endeavor. Also, ignore the possibility that your scientific work can make a safe Singularity. That would be science as instrumental value. I'm asking about science vs. art as intrinsic values.
EDIT: An obvious explanation: I was assuming that people here want to be rational as an instrumental value, and that we should find the distribution of intrinsic values to be the same as in the general populace. But of course some people are drawn here because rationality is an intrinsic value to them, and this heavily biases the distribution of intrinsic values found here.