Pierre-Andre comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong

132 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 March 2009 08:37AM

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Comment author: conchis 20 March 2009 01:32:23PM 4 points [-]

"However, unless a galactic overlord designed the universe to please homo sapien rationalists, I don't see any compelling rational reason to believe this to be the case."

Except that we are free to adopt any version of rationality that wins. Rationality should be responsive to a given universe design, not the other way around.

"Irrational belief systems often thrive because they overcome the prisoner dilemmas that individual rational action creates on a group level. Rational people cannot mimic this."

Really? Most of the "individual rationality -> suboptimal outcomes" results assume that actors have no influence over the structure of the games they are playing. This doesn't reflect reality particularly well. We may not have infinite flexibility here, but changing the structure of the game is often quite feasible, and quite effective.

Comment author: Annoyance 20 March 2009 02:23:15PM -1 points [-]

"Except that we are free to adopt any version of rationality that wins."

There's only one kind of rationality.

Comment author: Pierre-Andre 20 March 2009 04:26:06PM 3 points [-]

True, but that "one kind of rationality" might not be what you think it is. Conchis's point holds if you use "rationality" = "everything should always be taken into account, if possible" or something alike.

A "rational" solution to a problem should always take into account those "but in the real word it doesn't work like that...". Those are part of the problem, too.

For example, a political leader acting "rationally" will take into account the opinion of the population (even if they are "wrong" and/or give to much importance to X) if it can affect his results in the next election. The importance of this depends on his "goal" (position of power? well being of the population?) and on the alternative if not elected (will my opponent's decisions do more harm?).