Keith_Coffman comments on The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
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).