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adamzerner comments on Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gondolinian 18 May 2015 12:01AM

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Comment author: adamzerner 24 May 2015 01:09:24AM *  2 points [-]

All things you could easily get without being rational, and that rationality doesn't seem too correlated with (there's probably even a weak-moderate negative correlation).

  • I sense that a common rationalist perspective is to pay a lot more attention to the bad things, and not to be satisfied with the good. More generally, this seems to be the perspective of ambitious people.
  • Rationalists don't seem to be able to derive as much joy from interaction with normal people, and thus probably struggle to find strong relationships.
  • Normal people seem to derive a sense of fulfillment from things that they probably shouldn't. For example, my Uber driver was telling me how much fulfillment she gets from her job, and how she loves being able to help people get to where they're going. She didn't seem to be aware of how replaceable she is. She wasn't asking the question of "what would happen if I wasn't available as an Uber driver". Or "what if there was one less Uber drive available".

I should note that none of this is desirable, and that someone who's a perfect rationalist would probably do quite well in all of these areas. But I think that Reason as a memetic immune disorder applies here. It seems that the amount of rationality that is commonly attained often acts as an immune disorder in these situations.