Rifle scopes do not help help snipers shoot guns. They help snipers know where to aim to hit a target. If the military cut all funding for scopes, it's still physically possible to perform all the actions that would have been chosen had they had the equipment. It's even physically possible to shoot more accurately by firing unaimed shots than by firing aimed shots.
However, that would be a stupid idea. It's stupid because the odds are not better for a random shot than for an aimed shot.
Likewise, rationalists want to win, to hit the target. Sometimes we reason that for an individual shot, it feels like we would do better by not aiming. We check our reasoning over and over, but the output is "It is slightly better to not aim than aim here, this is an exception to the usual rule." In such cases, we aim anyway.
One problem with trying to believe false things is that those things can corrupt other beliefs and areas of study where we need truth and can't afford to be wrong. We can do better by relentlessly seeking truth, even when it seems like it would somewhat be better not to know.
Opinions may differ for cases where it seems extremely important to avoid the truth.
In short, we seek truth not for its own sake, but to win, and still seek it when it seems falsehood would probably better help us win, because that seeming is unreliable and usually wrong.
Likewise for killing people to accomplish a goal, they are analogous.
I say "we" but in truth only speak for myself.
Thank you! I think I have a better understanding of rationality now.
You're talking with someone you like, and they ask you what you mean by rationality, or why you keep going to LessWrong meetups. Or you meet someone who might be interested in the site.
What do you say to them? If you had to explain to someone what LW-style rationality is in 30 seconds, how would you do it? What's your elevator pitch? Has anyone had any success with a particular pitch?
My Current Pitch:
My current best one, made up on the spot, lacking any foreplanning, basically consists of:
"Basically, our brains are pretty bad at forming accurate beliefs, and bad in fairly systematic ways. I could show you one, if you want."
Playing the triplet game with them, then revealing that the numbers just need to be ascending
Upon failure, "Basically, your brain just doesn't look for examples that disprove your hypothesis, so you didn't notice that it could have a been a more general rule. There are a bunch of others, and I'm interested in learning about them so that I can correct for them."
My Thoughts on That:
It's massively effective at convincing people that cognitive biases exist (when they're in the 80% that fails, which has always been the case for me so far), but pretty much entirely useless as a rationality pitch. It doesn't explain at all why people should care about having accurate beliefs, and takes it as a given that that would be important.
It's also far too dry and unfun (compared to say, Methods), and has the unfortunate side effect of making people feel like they've gotten tricked. It makes it look non-cultish though.
I suspect that other people can do better, and I'll comment later with one that I actually put thought into. There's a pretty good chance that I'll use a few of the more upvoted ones and see how they go over.