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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate - Less Wrong
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There is no guarantee of a benevolent world, Eliezer. There is no guarantee that what is true is also beneficial. There is no guarantee that what is beneficial for an individual is also beneficial for a group.
You conflate many things here. You conflate what is true with what is right and what is beneficial. You assume that these sets are identical, or at least largely overlapping. 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.
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. The prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons are not new ideas. Telling people to act in the group interest because God said so is effective. It is easy to see how informing people of the costs of action, because truth is noble and people ought not be lied to, can be counter-effective.
Perhaps we should stop striving for the maximum rational society, and start pursuing the maximum rational society which is stable in the long term. That is, maybe we ought to set our goal to minimizing irrationality, recognizing that we will never eliminate it.
If we cannot purposely introduce a small bit of beneficial irrationality into our group, then fine: memetic evolution will weed us out and there is nothing we can do about it. People will march by the millions to the will of saints and emperors while rational causes whither on the vine. Not much will change.
Robin made an excellent post along similar lines, which captures half of what I want to say:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/j/the_costs_of_rationality/
I'll be writing up the rest of my thoughts soon.
Sorry, I can't find the motivation to jump on the non-critical bandwagon today. I had the idea about a week ago that there is no guarantee that truth= justice = prudence, and that is going to be the hobby-horse I ride until I get a good statement of my position out, or read one by someone else.
I one-box on Newcomb's Problem, cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma against a similar decision system, and even if neither of these were the case: life is iterated and it is not hard to think of enforcement mechanisms, and human utility functions have terms in them for other humans. You conflate rationality with selfishness, assume rationalists cannot build group coordination mechanisms, and toss in a bit of group selection to boot. These and the referenced links complete my disagreement.
Thanks for the links, your corpus of writing can be hard to keep up with. I don't mean this as a criticism, I just mean to say that you are prolific, which makes it hard on a reader, because you must strike a balance between reiterating old points and exploring new ideas. I appreciate the attention.
Also, did you ever reply to the Robin post I linked to above? Robin is a more capable defender of an idea than I am, so I would be intrigued to follow the dialog.
If you are rational enough, perceptive enough and EY's writing is consistant enough at some point you will not have to read everything EY writes to have a pretty good idea of what his views on a matter will be. I would bet a good some of money that EY would prefer to have his reader gain this ability then read all of his writings.