Jonathan_Lee comments on 'Is' and 'Ought' and Rationality - Less Wrong

2 Post author: BobTheBob 05 July 2011 03:53AM

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Comment author: Jonathan_Lee 05 July 2011 10:09:37AM 1 point [-]

The foundational problem in your thesis is that you have grounded "rationality" as a normative "ought" on beliefs or actions. I dispute that assertion.

Rationality is more reasonably grounded as selecting actions so as to satisfy your explicit or implicit desires. There is no normative force to statements of the form "action X is not rational", unpacked as "If your values fall into {large set of human-like values}, then action X is not optimal, choosing for all similar situations where the algorithm you use is run".

There may or may not be general facts about what it is "rational" for "people" to do; it depends rather crucially on how consistent terminal values are across the set of "people". Neglecting trade with Clippy, it is (probably) not rational for humans to convert Jupiter to paperclips. Clippy might disagree.

It should be clear that rational actions are predicated on terminal values, and do not carry normative connotations. Given terminal values, your means of selecting actions may be rational or otherwise. Again, this is not normative; it may be suboptimal.

Comment author: TrE 05 July 2011 02:13:09PM 0 points [-]