The Kif, like the rationalist, plays to win, no matter what that takes. They will keep promises if they feel that a reputation for keeping promises will help them to win later. They are perfectly capable of seeing, and taking advantage of, common goals; they can and will make alliances with each other, and with members of other species, as and where necessary. They have their own mental biases; but the highest-sfik Kif gain their status, in part, by being able to correct for those biases to some degree.
They would actually make reasonable rationalists, if it wasn't for their racial tendency to defect in Prisoners' Dilemmas and their complete lack of human morality. They'd certainly love the idea of rationality, because it leads to more sfik.
As far as success goes; they are not the biggest economic power in the series (that's the non-violent Stsho); they are not the biggest political power in the series (that's probably the Mahendo'sat), they don't have the best technology (that's the enigmatic Knnn), they may be the biggest military power in the series (or they may be second to the Knnn; the Mahendo'sat also have a comparable fleet), but not by much of a margin. (Especially since they're having a civil war at the time; two different Kif are contending for the position of species-wide leader).
They're a threat directly to the protagonist, and directly to the protagonists' home planet (which is most certainly not a major military power); and their civil war threatens to start dragging in other species and getting really messy.
I didn't say they were irrational, I said their goals (kill or frustrate high sfik individuals) were harder to co-operate on then our goals (maximise everyone's happiness, say.) If there were only two humans left, we would work to rebuild, but they would kill each other, or at least work to thwart each other's goals.
EDIT: Incidentally, if it's possible to have negative sfik, does that mean you can gain sfik by helping the disadvantaged?
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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