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Swimmer963 comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong
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Speaking solely for myself, I've found that my spiritual / religious side helps me to set goals and to communicate with my intuitions. Rationality is simply a tool for implementing those goals, and processing/evaluating that intuitive data.
I've honestly found the hostility towards "spirituality writ large" here rather confusing, as the majority of the arguments seem to focus on a fairly narrow subset of religious beliefs, primarily Christian. I tend to write it off as a rather understandable bias caused by generalizing from "mainstream Christianity", though, so it doesn't really bother me. When people present actual arguments, I do try and listen in case I've missed something.
Or, put another way: Rationality is for falsifiable aspects of my life, and spirituality is for the non-falsifiable aspects of my life. I can't have "incorrect" goals or emotions, but I can certainly fail to handle them effectively.
Maybe you disagree, but from what I've seen, a large subset of the LW population thinks that both goals and emotions can and should be modified if they are sub-optimal.
I can see handoflixue's logic, and your appeal to popularity does not defeat it. It makes LW seem to be irrational. To directly answer the logic, remind handoflixue that goals form a hierarchy of goals and subgoals, and a subgoal can be incorrect relative to a goal. Similarly, emotions can be subservient to goals. For example, anger can serve the goal of self-protection. A specific feeling of anger can then be judged as correct or incorrect depending on whether it serves this goal.
Finally, all of our conscious goals can be judged from the standpoint of natural selection. And conversely, a person may judge natural selection from the point of view of his conscious goals.
That...seems true. I guess I've never divided my goals into a hierarchy, and I often find my emotions annoying and un-useful. I think my comment holds more true for emotions than for goals, anyway. I'll have to think about this for a while. It's true that although I have tried to modify my top-level goals in the past, I don't necessarily do it because of rationality.