Keith_Coffman comments on The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 March 2007 04:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (22)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Keith_Coffman 03 September 2014 02:41:30AM *  0 points [-]

I would call coming to conclusions like this a shortcoming of our rational thinking, rather than the weighing of benefits and costs to a decision. What HalFinney said is completely right, in that we very often have to pick alternatives as a package, and in doing so we are forced to weigh factors for and against a proposition.

Personally, I wouldn't have "factually incorrectly" jumped to the conclusion you stated here (especially if the converse is stated explicitly as you did here), and I think this is a diversion to the point that you are necessarily (and rationally) weighing between two alternatives in this particular example that you chose.

That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of evaluating claims based on their merits rather than the people who propose them - that's the rational way to do things - and rational people would indeed keep a notebook even if, in the end, it was going to end up on a scale (or a decision matrix).