Rationality Quotes August 2012

Alejandro1

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I do care about everything that exists.

I think I care about almost nothing that exists, and that seems like too big a disagreement. It's fair to assume that I'm the one being irrational, so can you explain to me why one should care about everything?

All righty; I run my utility function over everything that exists. On most of the existing things in the modern universe, it outputs 'don't care', like for dirt. However, so long as a person exists anywhere, in this universe or somewhere else, my utility function cares about them. I have no idea what it means for something to exist, or why some things exist more than others; but our universe is so suspiciously simple and regular relative to all imaginable universes that I'm pretty sure that universes with simple laws or uniform laws exist more than univ... (read more)

3A1987dM14y

Try tabooing exist: you might find out that you actually disagree on fewer things than you expect. (I strongly suspect that the only real differences between the four possibilities in this is labels -- the way once in a while people come up with new solutions to Einstein's field equations only to later find out they were just already-known solutions with an unusual coordinate system.)