RichardKennaway comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: Kouran 04 January 2012 02:37:28PM 0 points [-]

Orthonormal, thank you for suggesting the Straw Vulcan talk to me. It was a fairly interesting talk I was encouraged to see rationality defined through various examples in a way that is useful, accepts emotionality and works with it. I did not myself have a Straw Vulcan view of rationality, far from it, but I do recognise a few of it's flawed features in rationalistic social theories.

However, even this speaker seemed to overstate people“s rationality. An example is given of teenagers doing dangerous things despite stating they consider the risks. The taking of the risk is attributed to flawed reasoning, miscalculation of risks and the like. From my perspective, it is much more likely that the teenagers considered the risks because they were warned against the behaviour and they realised that their peer group was about to do something their parent“s, guardians, etc. disagree with; the were somewhat anxious because they were aware of a moral conflict. However, their bond with the peer group, the emotional dynamic of the situation was not disrupted by the doubt, nor was it strong enough for them to exclude themselves from the situation (to leave), and so they took whatever risk they had pondered. I wouldn't appropriate this to flawed thinking; as I see it the thinking was fairly irrelevant to the situation, as it seems to me that it is to most situations.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 January 2012 03:44:46PM *  4 points [-]

Consider this (and this related thread) from the genes' point of view. It may be worth having all of your carriers do risky things, if the few that die of them are more than made up for by the ones who survive and learn something from the experience (such as how to kill big fierce animals without dying).

For a gene, there's nothing reckless about having your carriers act recklessly at a stage in their lives when their reproductive survival depends on learning how to do dangerous things.