Demosthenes comments on The Benefits of Rationality? - Less Wrong

18 Post author: cousin_it 31 March 2009 11:17AM

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Comment author: Demosthenes 01 April 2009 11:28:09PM 4 points [-]

Mysticism and random decision making are both acceptable and highly successful methods of making decisions; most of human history has relied on those two... we still rely on them. If you are a consequentialist, you can ignore the process and just rate the outcome; who cares why nice hair is correlated with success -it just is! Why does democracy work?

What makes rationalism worth the time is probably your regard for the process itself or for its outcomes. If its the outcomes then you might want to consider other options; following your biases and desires almost blindly works out pretty well for most people.