There is this story that I thought of when I originally read this. it can be found here. Like me, most of you who go through the link and read the speech will find obviously sub-optimal thinking. You will think "If it were an option of following this principle or not, I could not follow it. Even if I have no other principle to replace it with, I could not, in good conscience, accept this idea." This is were your rationality will destroy any group you try to create. If you cannot allow any sub-optimal parts in the organizations you participate in, then you will never participate in an organization of humans. The example I picked comes from a religious and irrational organization like Eliezer described, but it actually works, unlike co-ops of large groups of rationalists who refuse to accept sub-optimal planning in any form. So in this instance, Religion has a better policy than rationalists and, until you find an empirically proven policy that does better, you would do better to adopt it.
What about the policy of making an effort on your own and opting out of groups of either variety?
Today's post, Can Humanism Match Religion's Output? was originally published on 27 March 2009. 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 Your Price for Joining, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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