Some might hope that people who do not allow such a concern to be tempered by other concerns, perhaps of a social and moral/ethical nature, should be kept as far away as possible from any of these objects.
Concern for what's real and what's not should NOT be "tempered by other concerns". I think you're confused between descriptive and normative, aka between what is and what should be.
Besides, while you may turn away from learning, say, what happens when you get a certain amount of U-235 packed together, other people won't. And if at some point later they decide to come and take what used to be yours, well...
I think you're confused between descriptive and normative, aka between what is and what should be.
These notions are intertwined, rather. "Normative" concerns guide the "descriptive" inquiries we choose to undertake, and provide a criteria for what counts as a "successful" inquiry or experiment. Hume stated that reason should be a slave to passions; by contrast, medieval philosophers viewed "rational" inquiry as a slave to theology, with its cosmology (in the anthropological sense, i. e. what is our "basic,...
This would count toward my major, and if I weren't going to take it, the likely replacement would be a course in experimental/"folk" philosophy. But I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the virtues of academic rationality courses in general.
(The main counterargument, I'd imagine, is that the Sequences cover most of the same material in a more fluid and comprehensible fashion.)
Here is the syllabus: http://www.yale.edu/darwall/PHIL+333+Syllabus.pdf
Other information: I sampled one lecture for the course last year. It was a noncommital discussion of Newcomb's problem, which I found somewhat interesting despite having read most of the LW material on the subject.
When I asked what Omega would do if we activated a random number generator with a 50.01% chance of one-boxing us, the professors didn't dismiss the question as irrelevant, but they also didn't offer any particular answer.
I help run a rationality meetup at Yale, and this seems like a good place to meet interested students. On the other hand, I could just as easily leave flyers around before the class begins.
Related question: Could someone quickly sum up what might be meant by the "feminist critique" of rationality, as would be discussed in the course? I've read a few abstracts, but I'm still not sure I know the most important points of these critiques.