Rationality Quotes: June 2011

Oscar_Cunningham

Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Y'all know the rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

He was comparing Less Wrong to a book I was quoting from.

Unfavoruably. But what else is he comparing LW to? There seem to be two kinds of LessWrognians;

1) those who haven't read any mainstream philosophy, and think LW represents an unsurpassable pinnacle of excellence.

2) Those who have and don't.

*raises hand*

I haven't read any mainstream philosophy to speak of (I may have run into some somewhere and not noticed it as such, since I don't actually have a firm grasp on what it is and isn't), and wouldn't be especially surprised to find things in it that are at least as good as LW if I went looking for them.

4Will_Sawin15y

I have read some mainstream philosophy. I have read much of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and nothing else by Nozick. My view of LW is that the aspects of philosophy that I am interested in, that I have not already learned enough about from LW or other sources to satisfy me, are areas where LW pretty clearly beats mainstream philosophy. No one proved consequentialism, and yet consequentialism is right. Who proved Occam's Razor?