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paulfchristiano comments on Rationality Activism: Open Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: atucker 04 March 2011 02:06AM

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Comment author: paulfchristiano 05 March 2011 12:45:24AM 1 point [-]

if we aren't more successful or interesting than other people then we probably don't have much worth talking to them about

I would like to convince other people to play the same game as me. Rather than having very smart people thinking about how to solve some arbitrarily selected hard problem, I would rather they take a step back and make a desperate effort on humanity's behalf.

I think this is true regardless of whether I am more successful or interesting than they are.

Comment author: atucker 05 March 2011 01:11:59AM *  0 points [-]

if we aren't more successful or interesting than other people then we probably don't have much worth talking to them about

and

I would like to convince other people to play the same game as me. Rather than having very smart people thinking about how to solve some arbitrarily selected hard problem, I would rather they take a step back and make a desperate effort on humanity's behalf.

I don't think that these two ideas are at all contradictory. Ideally, we'd want people to to step back and try and help humanity, but in reality I think it would probably be very helpful to the goal of getting more rationalists (maybe even necessary?) for rationalists to be clearly successful.

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