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"?
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 about (just like people don't explicitly think about social status when they are outraged or dismissive, or don't explicitly think about expected utility when deciding), but it may still be a good (simplified) model of what people think.
And RomeoStevens is referring to what people think, he's just using "defection risk" as a shorthand. If you ask normal people, they'll usually talk in terms of trust.
You may object that the model is not good enough, but you'll need a better argument than "it's not what people think" (nobody is claiming it is); do you similarly object to discussing people's choices in terms of expected utility and opportunity costs?
The only two contexts I know where the expression "defection risk" has meaning is prisoner's dilemma and Cold War spy/counterintelligence games.
I think it's a wrong expression here both connotationally and denotationally.
I'm not saying it's not good enough, I'm saying it's wrong. To repeat myself, one-shot PD... (read more)