Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on To Lead, You Must Stand Up - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 December 2007 06:38AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 December 2007 08:00:49PM 13 points [-]

Rationality for the sake of rationality ends up as an arbitrary morality. If you do not have something more important in your eyes than "being rational", then you cannot learn from your success or failure; you will simply keep whatever definition of "rationality" you started with, because it is more important to you to be "rational" than to succeed.

No one puts a desperate effort (isshoukenmei) into rationality unless more than their own life is at stake. Leaving the pack is scarier than risking your life; that is why there are more motorcycle riders than rationalists.

I therefore decline to entertain the notion that I should provide you with some kind of idealized pure rationality which does not mention the goals that drive me as a rationalist. A pure desire to be "rational" is not the source of the drive to throw away old conceptions of "rationality" and invent better ones.