[SEQ RERUN] Your Rationality is My Business

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Today's post, Your Rationality is My Business was originally published on April 15, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

As humans, we have an interest in the future of human civilization, including the human pursuit of truth. That makes your rationality my business. However, calling out others as wrong can be a dangerous action. Some turn to relativism to avoid it, but this is too extreme. Disagreements should be met with experiments and arguments, not ignored or met with violence and edicts.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).

This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was New Improved Lottery, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Your Rationality is My Business was originally published on April 15, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

As humans, we have an interest in the future of human civilization, including the human pursuit of truth. That makes your rationality my business. However, calling out others as wrong can be a dangerous action. Some turn to relativism to avoid it, but this is too extreme. Disagreements should be met with experiments and arguments, not ignored or met with violence and edicts.

Is there a paper here that addresses this meta-question of "why be rational?"

Yes.

Short version: What do you want? That is your reason to be rational.

I can think of many reasons, but mostly it seems to come down to this: rationality confers power. Bertrand Russell called Western thought "power thought," which seems pretty accurate.

That seems accurate to you, because power is what you want. You have said this explicitly yourself: "Well I just want to rule the world." Because power is what you want, you assume that it is what everyone else wants. So when you read that rationality "wins", you interpret winning as "defeating other people". That is only "winning", in the sense of the slogan "rationality wins", if what you want is to subjugate or exterminate "the competition". You see everyone as "the competition", and your solution is to take over the world. Bertrand Russell gives you delightful cold prickles (I'm sure you have no use for warm fuzzies) because you hear in him something you want to hear: everyone is everyone's enemy. (BTW, here's some context for that phrase of his. Plato's totalitarian dream, 1931 edition.)

So it seems to me that the lasting appeal of irrationality, spirituality, religion, etc. is that, for some strange reason, people aren't quite comfortable worshipping this Terminator-like god of reason.

You are the would-be Terminator God, the self-styled AlphaOmega.

How's that going? What do you do when you're not reading LessWrong and being pissed on? Not that LW karma means anything in the greater scheme of things, but you keep coming back for more. It is said that he who would be Pope must think of nothing else. How much more so for he who would rule the world!