Yeah, I see that Future Tuesday Indifference is a bad example. Not precisely for the reason you give, though, because that would also entail that any discounting of future goods is irrational, and that doesn't seem right. But Future Tuesday Indifference would involve the sort of preference switching you see with hyperbolic discounting, which is more obviously irrational and might be confounding intuitions in this case.
So here's a better example: a person only assigns value to the lives of people who were born within a five-mile radius of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This is an ultimate value, not an instrumental one. There's no obvious incoherence involved here. A person could coherently optimize for this goal. But my point is that this does not exhaust our avenues for rational criticism of goals. The fact that this person has an ultimate value that relies on such a highly specific and arbitrary distinction is grounds for criticism, just as it would be if the person adopted a scientific theory which (despite being empirically adequate) postulated such a distinction.
Not precisely for the reason you give, though, because that would also entail that any discounting of future goods is irrational, and that doesn't seem right.
Discounting of future goods does not involve assigning different values to the same goods at the same time.
...So here's a better example: a person only assigns value to the lives of people who were born within a five-mile radius of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This is an ultimate value, not an instrumental one. There's no obvious incoherence involved here. A person could coherently optimize for this g
Lately I'd gotten jaded enough that I simply accepted that different rules apply to the elite class. As Hanson would say, most rules are there specifically to curtail those who don't have the ability to avoid them and to be side-stepped by those who do - it's why we evolved such big, manipulative brains. So when this video recently made the rounds it shocked me to realize how far my values had drifted over the past several years.
(the video is not about politics, it is about status. My politics are far from those of Penn)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWWOJGYZYpk&feature=sharek
It's good we have people like Penn around to remind us what it was like to be teenagers and still expect the world to be fair, so our brains can be used for more productive things.
By the measure our society currently uses, Obama was winning. Penn was not. Yet Penn’s approach is the winning strategy for society. Brain power is wasted on status games and social manipulation when it could be used for actually making things better. The machinations of the elite class are a huge drain of resources that could be better used in almost any other pursuit. And yet the elites are admired high-status individuals who are viewed as “winning” at life. They sit atop huge piles of utility. Idealists like Penn are regarded as immature for insisting on things as low-status as “the rules should be fair and apply identically to every one, from the inner-city crack-dealer to the Harvard post-grad.”
The “Rationalists Should Win” meme is a good one, but it risks corrupting our goals. If we focus too much on “Rationalist Should Win” we risk going for near-term gains that benefit us. Status, wealth, power, sex. Basically hedonism – things that feel good because we’ve evolved to feel good when we get them. Thus we feel we are winning, and we’re even told we are winning by our peers and by society. But these things aren’t of any use to society. A society of such “rationalists” would make only feeble and halting progress toward grasping the dream of defeating death and colonizing the stars.
It is important to not let one’s concept of “winning” be corrupted by Azathoth.
ADDED 5/23:
It seems the majority of comments on this post are people who disagree on the basis of rationality being a tool for achieving ends, but not for telling you what ends are worth achieving.
I disagree. As is written "The Choice between Good and Bad is not a matter of saying 'Good!' It is about deciding which is which." And rationality can help to decide which is which. In fact without rationality you are much more likely to be partially or fully mistaken when you decide.