Demosthenes

There's a proverb I failed to Google, which runs something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind." You wouldn't want others to expect you to lie, if you have something important to say to them; and this issue cannot be wholly decoupled from the issue of whether you actually tell the truth. If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become th

In the Robin Hanson tradition, whenever I think that I have figured out a flaw in Kant's reasoning, I halt, recognize that he lived until he was 79 and spent everyday of his life thinking about these sorts of things and taking long walks. It is good to question him, but also to be humble and research any extant rebuttals to one's own argument.

There is a good overview of Kant here: http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/intro/Kant_ethics.html

and more at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Kant had a peculiar obsession with what rational and reasoning actors wou... (read more)

I was just a little put off that you used me as an example of pulling Kant in when he doesn't apply: I took some care to keep Kant within Kant's domain and ask for specifics about how EY's OB position differed.

Most of your post is dedicated to refuting Kant's assumptions... that would have answer part of my questions in the other post ... but does it necessarily follow that he is pulled in to make one's opponents into straw men?

The discussion could have used some Kant and I am really do not agree that he does not apply.

In regard to why one shouldn't bring ... (read more)

Did anyone say that they believed in Kant?

Actual comment thread (with context intact!): (http://lesswrong.com/lw/6w/degrees_of_radical_honesty/4jn?context=1#4jn)

We were talking about never lying; I copied a quotation from Constant's critique of Kant (they were explicitly discussing a version of the "Tell-the-Murderer" thought experiment) and then summarized Kant's negative response to Constant.

I'm not really sure why one wouldn't bring it up? We had two different conceptions of why you shouldn't lie in the main post. Eliezer's sounded a lot like... (read more)

Mysticism and random decision making are both acceptable and highly successful methods of making decisions; most of human history has relied on those two... we still rely on them. If you are a consequentialist, you can ignore the process and just rate the outcome; who cares why nice hair is correlated with success -it just is! Why does democracy work?

What makes rationalism worth the time is probably your regard for the process itself or for its outcomes. If its the outcomes then you might want to consider other options; following your biases and desires almost blindly works out pretty well for most people.

logi:

That's possible and probably partially accurate; if there were more posts taking the form "I believe X because..." on Less Wrong, I might be more open to the idea that people are doing that.

Ciphergoth:

Also, this would be a terrible community to signal truth-seeking in, considering how entrenched the "rationality as win" metaphor is. As I mentioned in the hair example, I think a lot more people here are signaling a burning interest in real-world application than really have one.

I just wanted to get Yvain's opinion about how mu... (read more)

"To tell the truth is a duty, but is a duty only with regard to the man who has a right to the truth."

Kant disagrees and seems to warn that the principle of truth telling is universal; you can't go around deciding who has a right to truth and who does not. Furthermore, he suggests that your lie could have terrible unforeseen consequences.

Lie to the Nazis who you feel "don't deserve the truth" and then they end up treating everyone on the rest of the block like liars and sending all sorts of people to the concentration camps or outright ... (read more)

If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.

Is it correct to interpret this as similar to Pascal's Wager? The possibility of a fate-of-the-world moment is very low but the payout for being an honest fellow in this case is huge?

I would like to see more people who practice rationality and assumption questioning in other disciplices: women's studies, public policy, art and literature. I took a lot of literary philosophy classes back in the day and read quite a few post-modern critiques that mirror what I see on Less Wrong.

Almost every post-modern analysis depends on questioning how someone framed their subject and proceeds to recommend different assumptions; surely people with these backgrounds have examples to offer outside of game theory and psychology.

It would also be good to s... (read more)

And you must enjoy the signal value you a little bit! You aren't keeping your Less Wrong postings in your diary under lock and key!

Yvain:

Do you really believe that you engage in Truth-Seeking for utilitarian reasons? I get the impression that you don't really believe that.

Would you be willing to to enter a computer simulation where you got to investigate higher math puzzles (or metaphysics) with no applications? Spend your days in a fantastic and never-ending Truth-Seeking project (we'll throw great sex, food and housing into the holodeck for you as well)?

I liked this better at the beginning when you were prodding people who say that they see rationalism as a means to an end! You seem to be going back to consequentialism!

I don't believe that rationalists WIN because I don't believe that winning WINS

This debate has already played out in attacking and defending Pragmatism.

A lot of the rubrics by which to judge whether or not rationalism wins or whether or not rationalism is an end in itself involve assigning meaning and value on a very abstract level. Eliezer's posts outline a reductionist, materialist standpoint with some strong beliefs about following the links of causality. Rationalism follows, but rationalism isn't going to prove itself true.

Deciding that rationalism is the best answer for your axiomatic belief system requires taking a metaphysical... (read more)

The Nacirema are actually just gaseous meat sacks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE

That was my point; I was making a dig on the goals of argumentative atheists looking for a support group vs people who might want to advance rationalist goals

In a nutshell, it might be cool to make a website and organization that promotes data collections and debate.

Rationalism requires access to high quality empirical evidence. Holding your hypotheses up to constantly changing data is a major theme of this site.

We can only rationally discuss our hypotheses and beliefs when we have something to test and the quality of datasets floating around on the internet is often low or inaccessible.

A good rationalist project might be to highlight resources for empirical evidence, run "data debates" where experts ... (read more)

Yvain is spot on; secular service organization already exist and function. I have occasionally attended some meetings at a Rotary club and it usually involves eating, a list of ongoing activities, community highlights and recognition of visiting members.

What is special about the way a rationalist helps people? Maybe starting a program to fund probability and philosophy of science classes in the community?

Law school sounds like the best option for finding fellow argumentative atheists.

In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.

....or maybe the quotation and by extension the entire comment were meant to suggest that traditionally materialist concerns like sanitation, wealth and longevity are more deserving of the title enlightenment and than our categorizing of enlightenment to only m... (read more)

If anyone wants to do some background reading on the test before commenting, this paper addresses some of the common criticisms:

http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/FACULTY/Markman/jpsp01.pdf

"How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the IAT"

Yes! something like a table of contents?

The Tag Cloud is a good way to start, but once you generate 10 posts a day for too long, the tag cloud is no longer a useful navigation tool

Something like this maybe: http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph

Drupal can also automatically generate "related content" based on whatever criteria you define as important or manually entered links. Adding more and more blocks to the page might not be good for efficiency, but providing more diverse paths to explore the content on these sites would be great.

In the long ru... (read more)

Has anyone brought up this study by Bruner and Potter (1964) before? I think it would relate to intertemporal beliefs and how we sometimes perceive them to be more sound than they really are:

http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~kin356/bpdemo.htm

In this demonstration, you will see nine different pictures. The pictures will get clearer and clearer. Make a guess as to what is being shown for each of the pictures, and write down your guess. Note the number of the picture where you were first able to recognize what was being shown. Then go backwards - press the "