I was reading reviews of HPMOR on Goodreads and I noticed that the people who didn't like the book were essentially "put off by the rationality". They thought Harry was arrogant and condescending.
Then I was thinking, a lot of people are "put off by rationality" for similar reasons. What a shame. There's a lot of value in spreading rationality, and this seems to be a big obstacle in doing so.
Any thoughts on how to make people less "put off by rationality"? I think the core issues are:
- In some cases, people think it's rude to suggest to someone that they're wrong. (I have a vague idea of when, but am having trouble articulating it. Can anyone articulate this well?). Edit: EY has articulated (part?) of what I'm getting at. He calls it the status slapdown emotion.
- People pattern-match the tone to "smart aleck"?
No, I still don't think so. The expression "defection risk" implies the one-shot prisoner dilemma context and neither such a situation is common in real life, nor normal people think in such categories (correctly, too).
"I don't trust someone like that" should just be interpreted directly according to its plain meaning. Not trusting someone does not imply a PD-like context and/or an expectation of defection.
"Too smart for his own good" I understand as meaning "He's smart enough to figure out how to bend the rules or go around them, but he is not smart enough to figure all the consequences of that and weight them properly". Again, nothing related to PD.
You're reading too much into what RomeoStevens wrote - at no point did he explicitly mention the one-shot Prisonner's Dilemma.
A pretty common usage here is to use the Prisonner's Dilemma as a simplified model (think spherical cow on a frictionless plane, or perfect gas) of many morally-relevant situations.
This model is not what people explicitly think abou... (read more)