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Capla comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Also, keep in mind that many of these secondary ideas sprang from rationalist origins: cryonics is presented as an "obvious" rational choice, when you don't let your biases get in the way: you have an expressed desire not to die, this is the only available option to not die. Polyamory similarly came to bear as the result of looking at relationships "with fresh eyes." These secondary topics gain prominence because they are examples (debatablly) of rationality applied to specific problems. They are the object level; "Rationality" is the meta level. But, like I said, it's a lot easier to think at the object level, because that can be visualized, so most people do.
From the point of view of someone who doesn't buy into them, I think it's only incidental that those specific positions are advocated as a logical consequence of more rational thinking and not others. Had the founders not been American programmers, the "natural and obvious" consequences of their rationalism would have looked highly different. My point being that these practices are not at all more rational than the alternatives and very likely less so. But yeah, if these ideas gain rationalist adherents, then obviously some of the advocacy for them is going to take a rationalist-friendly form, with rationalist lingo and emphasized connections to rationalism.
Just curious, are there any positions which you you regard as "a logical consequence of more rational thinking"?
Yes -- atheism. And by extension disbelief in the supernatural. It's the first consequence of acquiring better thinking practices. However, it is not as if atheism in itself forms a good secondary basis for discussion in a rationalist community, since most of the activity would necessarily take the form of "ha ha, look how stupid these people are!". I would know; been there, done that. But it gets very old very quickly, and besides isn't of much use except for novice apostates who need social validation of their new identities. From that point of view I regard atheism as a solved problem and therefore uninteresting.
Nothing else seems to spring to mind, though -- or at least no positive rather than negative positions on ideological questions. "Don't be a fanatic", "don't buy snake oil", "don't join cults", "check the prevailing scientific paradigms before denying things left and right [evolution, moon landing, the Holocaust, global warming etc.]"... critical thinking 101. Mostly all other beliefs and practices that seem to go hand in hand with rationalism seem to be explainable by membership of this particular cluster of Silicon Valley culture.
Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
I don't know, I like the option of locking yourself in a vault when you're about to die so that time travellers can come and rescue you without changing history, since nobody can see into the vault.
Okay, I lied, I don't like that option, but it's not worse than cryonics, and does count as another available option./
I want to emphasize that I neither endorse nor oppose the conclusion that polyamory or cryonics are rational, just point out that they are included in discussion here, in large part, because of how they impinge, or are presumed to impinge, on rationality.