I think Eli has the better starting point. If you want to understand a strange philosophical system you have to start by figuring out what it's members believe, how they think about the world, what they profess that they ought to do. Once you understand that, you'll want to go on to look at how their actual actions differ from their beliefs and how the predictions of their theories differ from reality. But if you don't start with their beliefs, you'll never be able to predict how an adherent would actually respond to any novel situation.
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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