Carinthium comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong

116 Post author: RobinHanson 17 March 2009 01:39PM

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Comment author: mtraven 17 March 2009 08:00:20PM 6 points [-]

For whatever reason, the community here (so-called "rationalists") is heavily influenced by overly-individualistic ideologies (libertarianism, or in its more extreme forms, objectivism). This leads to ignoring entire realms of human phenomena (social cognition) and the people who have studied them (Vygotsky, sociologists of science, ethnomethodology). It's not that social approaches to cognition provide a magic bullet -- they just provide a very different perspective on how minds work. Imagine if you stop believing that beliefs are in the head and locate themselves in a community or institution. If interested, you could start with How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.

Comment author: Carinthium 24 November 2010 09:08:20AM 1 point [-]

The flaw in that is that ignores dissenters- to some extent, minorities in a community can dissent from the common belief.