It may come as a shock, but in my case, being rational is not my highest priority. I haven't actually come up with a proper wording for my highest priority yet, but one of my major goals in pursuing that priority is to facilitate a universal ability for people to pursue their own goals (with the normal caveats about not harming or overly interfering with other people, of course). One of the primary reasons I pursue rationality is to support that goal.
Once I realized that achieving anything, no matter what, required my being rational, I quickly bumped "being rational" to the top of my to-do list.
Yes, I see that you did that. Why would I want to do that, given my current utility function? I appear to be accomplishing things reasonably well as is, and it looks like if I made that change, I wouldn't wind up accomplishing things that my current utility function values at all.
Is it impossible to be an x-rationalist and still value people?
'People' do not lend themselves to any particular utility. The Master of the Way treats people as straw dogs.
Persuasiveness: You fail at it.
Why would I want to do that, given my current utility function?
What's the function you use to evaluate your utility function?
Persuasiveness: You fail at it.
Persuasiveness: what I was not aiming for.
A currently existing social norm basically says that everyone has the right to an opinion on anything, no matter how little they happen to know about the subject.
But what if we had a social norm saying that by default, people do not have the right to an opinion on anything? To earn such a right, they ought to have familiarized themselves on the topic. The familiarization wouldn't necessarily have to be anything very deep, but on the topic of e.g. controversial political issues, they'd have to have read at least a few books' worth of material discussing the question (preferrably material from both sides of the political fence). In scientific questions where one needed more advanced knowledge, you ought to at least have studied the field somewhat. Extensive personal experience on a subject would also be a way to become qualified, even if you hadn't studied the issue academically.
The purpose of this would be to enforce epistemic hygiene. Conversations on things such as public policy are frequently overwhelmed by loud declarations of opinion from people who, quite honestly, don't know anything on the subject they have a strong opinion on. If we had in place a social norm demanding an adequate amount of background knowledge on the topic before anyone voiced an opinion they expected to be taken seriously, the signal/noise ratio might be somewhat improved. This kind of a social norm does seem to already be somewhat in place in many scientific communities, but it'd do good to spread it to the general public.
At the same time, there are several caveats. As I am myself a strong advocate on freedom of speech, I find it important to note that this must remain a *social* norm, not a government-advocated one or anything that is in any way codified into law. Also, the standards must not be set *too* high - even amateurs should be able to engage in the conversation, provided that they know at least the basics. Likewise, one must be careful that the principle isn't abused, with "you don't have a right to have an opinion on this" being a generic argument used to dismiss any opposing claims.