= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nornagest comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (558)
The question I was trying to answer wasn't whether they were right, it was whether a rational actor could hold those opinions. That has a lot less to do with factual accuracy and a lot more to do with internal consistency.
As to the correctness of normative claims -- well, that's a fairly subtle question. Deontological claims are often entangled with factual ones (e.g. the existence-of-God thing), so that's at least one point of grounding, but even from a consequential perspective you need an optimization objective. Rational actors may disagree on exactly what that objective is, and reasonable-sounding objectives often lead to seriously counterintuitive prescriptions in some cases.
Oh, right, I see what you mean. Sure, people can disagree with each other without either being irrational: All that takes is for them to have different information. For example, one can rationally believe the earth is flat, depending on which time and place one grew up in.
That does not change the fact that these questions have a correct answer though, and it should be pretty clear which the correct answers are in the above examples, even though you can never be 100% certain of course. The point remains that just because a question is political does not mean that all answers are equally valid. False equivalence and all that.