They are very much the product of a dominator culture as opposed to being more focused on, say, care and nurturing - be it of fellow human beings or our natural environment, a real-life symbiote without which our communities cannot possibly thrive or be sustainable.
"Winning" means maximizing your utility function. If you think that "care and nurturing" are important, and yet you failed to include them in your utility function, the fault lies with you, not rationality. Complaining about rationality not taking into account care and nurturing is like complaining about your car not taking into account red lights.
LessWrong folks like to talk about their pursuit of a "Friendly AI" as a possible escape from this dilemma.
What dilemma?
But it's not clear at all just how 'friendly' an AI could be to, say, indigenous peoples whose way of life and culture does not contemplate Western technology.
An AI friendly to Western values would be a tool through which Western civilization could enforce it values. If you don't like Western values, then your objection is against Western values, not with the tool used to facilitate them.
As a general rule of thumb, our developments in so-called "rationality" have not been kind to such groups.
I don't find that to be clear. The mistreatment of non-Western people can arguably be attributed to anti-rational positions, and my most measures, most people are better off today than the average person was a thousand years ago.
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.