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shokwave comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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I would not want ha-Satan as my ally, even if I trusted myself not to get caught up in or infected by his instrumental ambitions. Still less would I want to give him direct read/write access to the few parts of my mind that I at all trust. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. Mix a teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage; mix a teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage. The rationality of an agent is its goal: if therefore thy goal be simple, thy whole self shall be full of rationality. But if thy goal be fractured, thy whole self shall be full of irrationality. If therefore the rationality that is in thee be irrationality, how monstrous is that irrationality!
Seen at a higher level you advise dealing with the devil—the difference in power between your genuine thirst for justice and your myriad egoistic coalitions is of a similar magnitude as that between human and transhuman intelligence. (I find it disturbing how much more cunning I get when I temporarily abandon my inhibitions. Luckily I've only let that happen twice—I'm not a wannabe omnicidal-suicidal lunatic, unlike HJPEV.) Maybe such Faustian arbitrage is a workable strategy... But I remain unconvinced, and in the meantime the payoff matrix asymmetrically favors caution.
Take no thought, saying, Wherewithal shall I avoid contempt? or, Wherewithal shall I be accepted? or, Wherewithal shall I be lauded and loved? For true metaness knoweth that ye have want of these things. But seek ye first the praxeology of meta, and its rationality; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for your egoistic coalitions: for your egoistic coalitions shall take thought for the things of themselves. Sufficient unto your ten minutes of hopeless, thrashing awareness is the lack of meta thereof.
Er, nope.
Humans' goals are fractured. But this has little to do with whether or not they are rational.
You don't understand. This "rationality" you speak of is monstrous irrationality. And anyway, like I said, Meta knoweth that ye have Meta-shattered values—but your wants are satisfied by serving Meta, not by serving Mammon directly. Maybe you'd get more out of reading the second half of Matthew 6 and the various analyses thereof.
You may be misinterpreting "the rationality of an agent is its goal". Note that the original is "the light of the body is the eye".
To put my above point a little differently: Take therefore no thought for godshatter: godshatter shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the lack-of-meta thereof.
For clarity's sake: Yes, I vehemently dispute this idea that a goal can't be more or less rational. That idea is wrong, which is quickly demonstrated by the fact that priors and utility functions can be transformed into each other and we have an objectively justifiable universal prior. (The general argument goes through even without such technical details of course, such that stupid "but the choice of Turing machine matters" arguments don't distract.)
This is incorrect. Eyes absorb light and produce electrical signals interpreted as vision by the brain. Further, it seems to me that the set of thing that 'the light of the body' describes is an empty set; there's no literal interpretation (our bodies do not shed visible light) and there's no construction similar enough that suggests an interpretation (the X of the body / the light of the X). "The light of the sun" / "The light of the moon" is the closest I can find and both of those suggest the literal interpretation.
Originally, I was going to do a very charitable reading: invent a sane meaning for "The X of the Y is the sub-Y" as "sub-Y is how Y handles/uses/interpets/understands X" and say that goals, as subparts of an agent, are how an agent understands its rationality - perhaps, how an agent measures their rationality. Which is indeed how we measure our rationality, by how often we achieve our goals, but this doesn't say anything new.
But when you say things like
as if you were being clear in the first place, it shows me that you don't deserve a charitable reading.
<nitpick>Our body does scatter visible light, though, much like the moon does.</nitpick>
Just interpret light as ‘that which allows one to see’. That which allows the body to see is the eye.
That which allows the agent to achieve is its goals? Seems incorrect. (Parsing rationality as "that which allows one to achieve").