If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
I was being cheeky, yes, but also serious. What do you call a perfect rationalist? A sociopath[1]. A fair amount of rationality training is basically reprogramming oneself to be mechanical in one's response to evidence and follow scripts for better decision making. And what kind of world would we live in if every single person was perfectly sociopathic in their behaviour? For this reason in part, I think the idea of making the entire world perfectly rationalist is a potentially dangerous proposition and one should at least consider how far along that trajectory we would want to take it.
But the response I gave to ingive was 5 words because for all the other reasons you gave I did not feel it would be a productive use of my time to engage further with him.
[1] ETA: Before I get nitpicked to death, I mean the symptoms often associated with high-functioning sociopathy, not the clinical definition which I'm aware is actually different from what most people associate with the term.
No, you don't. A perfect rationalist is not a sociopath because a perfect rationalist understands what they are, and by scientific inquiry can constantly update and align themselves with reality. If every single person was a perfect rationalist then the world would be a utopia, in the sense that extreme poverty would instantly be eliminated. You're assuming that a perfect rationalist cannot see through the illusion of self and identity, and update its beliefs by understanding neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Complete opposite, they will be seen as ph... (read more)