That looks like losing your rationality by reading LessWrong. As does this by XiXiDu that he links to.
A couple of quotes from the latter strike me:
Logical implications just don’t seem enough in some cases.
and
Until the above problems are resolved, or sufficiently established, I will continue to put vastly more weight on empirical evidence and my intuition than on logical implications
That is as it should be. Blindly following logic wherever it takes you is like strapping yourself to a rocket with no steering.
I've never been able to make sense of the traditional koans, not because I find them hard puzzles, but because I don't even see what puzzle is being posed. But we have here in the LessWrong material koans aplenty.
Mentalism cannot be true! Physicalism cannot be true!
Bayesian reasoning is the only way! We cannot do Bayesian reasoning!
Aumann agreement! Dissension among rational people!
Human intelligence is possible! After sixty years of trying we haven't the slightest idea how!
Trolley problems!
TORTURE vs. SPECKS!
Quantum suicide!
Give me all your money and I'll repay you 3^^^3-fold!
The Utility Monster!
The Repugnant Conclusion!
You spend one dead child at Starbucks every year!
Vast stakes depend on your slightest decision! You cannot evaluate them! You must evaluate them!
You have six hours to cut down a tree! It will take twelve hours to sharpen your axe! The first god we make will torture you forever for failing!
Until very recently I thought it might be just me and that you people can calculate what you should do. But then I learnt that even important SI donors have similar problems. And other people as well.
The problem is that all the talk about approximations is complete handwaving and that you really can't calculate shit. And even if you could, there doesn't seem to be anything medium-probable that you could do about it.
...‘Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion.
Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.