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entirelyuseless comments on Emotional tools for the beginner rationalist - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gleb_Tsipursky 09 October 2015 05:01AM

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Comment author: entirelyuseless 11 October 2015 01:03:14PM 0 points [-]

I doubt there can literally be someone who "does not care about having true beliefs." No matter how false and irrational someone's beliefs are, he still wants those beliefs to be true, so he still wants true beliefs. What happens is this:

Some people want to believe the truth. Position X seems likely to be true. So they want to believe X.

Other people want to believe X. If X is true, that would be a reason to believe it. So they want X to be true.

The first people will be in your categories R1 and R2. The second people will be in your category R0, in the sense that what is basically motivating them is the desire to believe a concrete position, not the desire to believe the truth. But they also have the desire to believe the truth. It is just weaker than their desire to believe X.

But as you say, if someone wants something more than the truth, he wants that more than the truth. No argument is necessarily going to change his desires.