Rationality Quotes February 2014

A1987dM

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I don't know who you're arguing against, but it certainly isn't me.

As I've stated Oh, at least a dozen times in this thread, I don't want all marriages to be unbreakable. I just want people to be able to set the terms of their marriages as they see fit. No-one should be forced to remain in a marriage they don't want to, but people who break marriage contracts should have to pay damages according to the terms of that contract, just as I can't be made to live somewhere I don't want to, but I will have to pay damages if I break the lease.

It isn't force over trade. Contracts are trade. People must be held to the terms of their contract(or damages) or there is no trade.

So, you choose not to address the grandparent's point about social stigma, and you want to add other 'optional' binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.

If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.

1Richard_Kennaway12y

For better or worse, marriages as presently constituted in the West are not commercial contracts, but legal, social, and (optionally) religious arrangements conferring certain statuses on the partners in the eyes of the law, society, the relevant religious bodies, and each other. If you want a marriage contract such as you describe, there's no point in complaining that marriage contracts as they exist are not that. It would take a legal historian to say authoritatively, but I am not sure they ever have been. There are various similarities and differences, but they are different entities. What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach. If you find that it cannot be done, then you would have to agitate for such changes to the law as would be necessary to recognise it. If that's too big a job for one person, you could combine with others, register a domain -- realmarriage.org is available -- and begin a movement.

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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Rationality Quotes February 2014

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