Every now and then, one reads an article about the Singularity in which some reporter confidently asserts, "The Singularitarians, followers of Ray Kurzweil, believe that they will be uploaded into techno-heaven while the unbelievers languish behind or are extinguished by the machines."

I don't think I've ever met a single Singularity fan, Kurzweilian or otherwise, who thinks that only believers in the Singularity will go to upload heaven and everyone else will be left to rot. Not one. (There's a very few pseudo-Randian types who believe that only the truly selfish who accumulate lots of money will make it, but they expect e.g. me to be damned with the rest.)

But if you start out thinking that the Singularity is a loony religious meme, then it seems like Singularity believers ought to believe that they alone will be saved. It seems like a detail that would fit the story.

This fittingness is so strong as to manufacture the conclusion without any particular observations. And then the conclusion isn't marked as a deduction. The reporter just thinks that they investigated the Singularity, and found some loony cultists who believe they alone will be saved.

Or so I deduce. I haven't actually observed the inside of their minds, after all.

Has any rationalist ever advocated behaving as if all people are reasonable and fair? I've repeatedly heard people say, "Well, it's not always smart to be rational, because other people aren't always reasonable." What rationalist said they were? I would deduce: This is something that non-rationalists believe it would "fit" for us to believe, given our general blind faith in Reason. And so their minds just add it to the knowledge pool, as though it were an observation. (In this case I encountered yet another example recently enough to find the reference; see here.)

(Disclaimer: Many things have been said, at one time or another, by one person or another, over centuries of recorded history; and the topic of "rationality" is popularly enough discussed that some self-identified "rationalist" may have described "rationality" that way at one point or another. But I have yet to hear a rationalist say it, myself.)

I once read an article on Extropians (a cert...

Disciple_of_Dawkins

Disciple_of_Dawkins

Disciple_of_Dawkins

Disciple_of_Dawkins