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Alicorn comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong
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Rationalization is an important skill and should be rewarded, not punished. If you never try to rationalize others' decisions then you won't notice when they actually do have a good justification, and if you never practice rationalization then you'll never get good enough at it to find their justifications when they exist. The result is gross overconfidence in the stupidity of the opposing side and thus gross overconfidence in one's own rationality. That leads to tragedies and atrocities, both personal and societal.
Perspective-taking is a separate "skill" from rationalizing one's own behavior.
Hm, is perspective-taking the same skill that I was talking about? I can't tell. Also I thought that Eliezer's examples were phrased in the hypothetical, and thus it'd be rationalizing others' beliefs/behavior, not one's own. I'm not sure to what extent rationalizing a conclusion and rationalizing one's own behavior are related. Introspectively, the defensiveness and self-justifying-ness inherent to the latter makes it a rather different animal.