Let's discuss partial solutions.

Suppose you and random other English speakers were abducted by aliens and accelerating out of the solar system on their ship. You strongly suspect you will never be able to go back, and get to work on building a new society.

You are the smartest person in the group and convince everyone that language is important. They agree to reform the language, but aren't capable of constructing or learning a new one, and aren't interested in teaching their children one. What simple reforms might be a good idea?

I can suggest some:

It will no longer be correct to say that something is (a color or similar property). One must say it "seems" a color, as well as to whom. Not "Snow is white", rather, "Snow seems white to me".

"Rationalize" will be replaced by a word with a different root.

Hi there, fairly new here to LW. I'm reading through the sequences in order. went through map and territory and mysterious answers to mysterious questions. Now going through this 37 ways words can be wrong sequence, as its recommended before i delve into reductionism.

Its been said several times that LW tries to cater to a broad audience, but i find myself lost here. I have not extensively studied physics, only having done 1 year of engineering so far, and the physics references here are pretty much unintelligible to me. I don't know what configuration space is, or quaternary coordinates, or thingspace, or what strings are being referred to. I find myself struggling to grasp this post.

EDIT: I've read through this a few times. I still have almost no idea on most of the math, but I'm guessing the "moral" of this post is basically "don't become overly obsessed with definitions"?

I agree that it's not necessarily irrational to feel, but I think the way we feel is clearly irrational. For example, our emotions don't seem to work in a time-consistent manner, and we often later regret actions that we take based on strong emotions, when those emotions eventually fade away. If we could modify the way our emotions work cheaply and safely, I think many of us would probably take advantage of the opportunity. A rational agent wouldn't wish to modify its mind like that.

Here's another, more specific example. I sometimes feel a sense of schadenfreude when someone that I might be in status competition with publicly makes a mistake or suffers a setback of some kind. By itself, this feeling may not be irrational (except perhaps on a group level), but I simultaneously feel a disgust for myself for feeling this way, and wish that I could edit away this ugly emotion. (Until then, I have to spend some effort to keep myself from being overly critical of others.) Would anyone claim that these emotions together do not constitute irrationality?

Just to confirm:

Another way of explaining the 'locating the hypothesis' concept would be to say: "When answering a question with a large number of possible answers, it takes more work to narrow down the possibilities (generate the reasonable hypotheses) than it does to test those hypotheses for correctness."

Is that right?

Sweatshop proponents make arguments like this. Yes, sweatshops are often chosen over prostitution and subsistence farming--but surely there's something even better.

I am reasonably sure that a single pebble, taken from a beach of our own Earth, does not specify the continents and countries, politics and people of this Earth.

A single pebble contains a lot of atoms an those atoms interact via gravitational forces with the world around them. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle might prevent you from knowing everything about earth from a single pebble but otherwise you just would have to measure the movement of the atoms in the pebble closely enough.

Rationality has plenty to say about whether abortion is morally permissible.

Are fetuses sentient, for example? Do they feel pain? What would happen socially, economically, if we outlawed abortion? Who would benefit? Who would be harmed? How much?

If you're a strict utilitarian, moral problems reduce to factual problems. But even if you're not, facts often have a great deal to say about morality. This is especially true in issues like economics and foreign policy, where the goals are largely undisputed and it's the facts and methods that are in question. I challenge you to find an American politician who says he wants to increase poverty or undermine American national security. "We need 10% of Americans to starve! And by the way, I hope China invades!" (I guess I should hedge my bets and say that such bizarre people may exist---after all, Creationists do---but they aren't likely to get a lot of votes from any party.)

Also, rationality can assess the arguments used for and against political positions. If one side is using a lot of hard data and the other one is making a lot of logical fallacies... that's should give you a pretty good idea of which side to be on. (It's no guarantee, but what is?)