Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Do not quote yourself
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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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.

An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine

I'm not at all convinced of this. It seems to me that a genuinely ethical life requires extraordinary, desperate asceticism. Anything less is to place your own wellbeing above those of your fellow man. Not just above, but many orders of magnitude above, for even trivial luxuries.

If I may be so bold as to summarize this thread:

Whatever utility calculus you follow, it is a mathematical model.
"All models are false."
In particular, what's going wrong here is your model is treating you, the agent, as atomic. In reality, as Kaj Sotala described very well below, you are not an atomic agent, you have an internal architecture, and this architecture has very important ramifications for how you should think about utilities.

If I may make an analogy from the field of AI. In the old days, AI was concerned about something cal... (read more)

25MixedNuts14y

Julia Wise would disagree, on the grounds that this is impossible to maintain and you do more good if you stay happy.