Rationality quotes are self-explanatory.  Irrationality quotes often need some context and explication, so they would break the flow in Rationality Quotes.

In theory, the free market and democracy both work because suppliers are incentivized to provide products and services that people want.  Economists consider it a perverse situation when the market does not provide what people want, and look for explanations such as government regulation.

The funny thing is that sometimes the market doesn't work, and I look and look for the reason why, and all I can come up with is, People are stupid.

I've written before about the market's apparent failure to provide cup holders in cars.  I saw another example this week in the latest Wired magazine, a piece on page 42 about a start-up called Thinx to make re-usable women's underwear that absorbs menstrual fluid--all of it, so women don't have to slip out of the middle of meetings to change tampons.  The piece's angle was that venture capitalists rejected the idea because they were mostly men and so didn't "get it".

I'd guess they "got it".  It isn't a complicated idea.  The thing is, there are already 3 giant companies battling for that market.  The first thing a VC would say when you tell him you're going to make something better than a tampon is, "Why haven't Playtex, Kotex, or Tampax already done that?"

So, Thinx did a kickstarter and has now sold hundreds of thousands of thousands of absorbent underwear for about $30 each.

The failure in this case is not that VCs are sexist, but that Playtex, etc., never developed this product, although there evidently is a demand for it, and there is no evident reason it couldn't have been produced 20 years ago.  The belief that the market doesn't fail then almost led to a further failure, the failure to develop the product at the present time, because the belief that the market doesn't fail implied the product could not be profitable.

I just now came across an even clearer case of market failure: Sugar-free Tums.

The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:

3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism

The scenario is always the same: I say we should  abolish prisons,  police, and the  American settler state— someone tells me I’m irrational. I say we need  decolonization of the land — someone tells me I’m not being realistic.... When those who are the loudest, the most disruptive — the ones who want to destroy America and all of the oppression it has brought into the world — are being silenced even by others in social justice groups, that is unacceptable.

(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)

I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man.  This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman.  The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally.  Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.

This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website.  I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.

But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.

For some time now, "Promoted" has been reserved for articles written by MIRI staff, mostly about MIRI activities.  Which, I suppose, would be reasonable, if this were MIRI's blog.  But it isn't.  MIRI has its own blog.  It seems to me inconvenient both to readers of LessWrong, and to readers of MIRI's blog, to split MIRI's material up between the two.

People visiting lesswrong land on "Promoted", see a bunch of MIRI blogs, mostly written by people who don't read LessWrong themselves much anymore, and get a mistaken impression of what people talk about on LessWrong.  Also, LessWrong looks like a dying site, since often months pass between new posts.

I suggest the default landing page be "New", not "Promoted".

I've said before that social reform often seems to require lying.  Only one-sided narratives offering simple solutions motivate humans to act, so reformers manufacture one-sided narratives such as we find in Marxism or radical feminism, which inspire action through indignation.  Suppose you tell someone, "Here's an important problem, but it's difficult and complicated.  If we do X and Y, then after five years, I think we'd have a 40% chance of causing a 15% reduction in symptoms."  They'd probably think they had something better to do.

But the examples I used in that previous post were all arguably bad social reforms: Christianity, Russian communism, and Cuban communism.

The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid, or that there's some game-theoretic reason why social reform that's very worthwhile to society as a whole isn't worthwhile to any individual in society.

Is that true?  Or are people correct and justified in not making sudden changes until there's a clear problem and a clear solution to it?

When we talk about recursively self-improving AI, the word "recursive" there is close enough to being literal rather than metaphoric that we glide over it without asking precisely what it means.

But it's not literally recursion—or is it?

The notion is that an AI has a function optimize(X) which optimizes itself. But it's recursion in the sense of modifying itself, not calling itself. You can imagine ways to do this that would use recursion—say, the paradigmatic executable that rewrites its source code, compiles it, and exec's it—but you can imagine many ways that would not involve any recursive calls.

Can we define recursive self-improvement precisely enough that we can enumerate, explicitly or implicitly, all possible ways of accomplishing it, as clearly as we can list all possible ways of writing a recursive function? (You would want to choose one formalism to use, say lambda calculus.)

I'm interested in how people form valuations of the opinions of others. One domain to study is art. We have a long historic record of how the elite arbiters of taste have decided what artists and what artworks were great.

This is more relevant to 21st century American thought than many of you probably think. The defaults we assume, the stories that are told on television and in our movies, the things taught in our colleges, were partly determined by assertions made by continental philosophers and psychologists of the 18th through 20th centuries, most of which they just made up. [1]

The process by which philosophers eventually get their views accepted into the Western canon looks the same to me as the process by which musicians or painters are accepted into or cast out of the Western canon. Neither has much to do with the quality of the product.

A friend referred me to another paper on the Sleeping Beauty problem. It comes down on the side of the halfers.

I didn't have the patience to finish it, because I think SB is a pointless argument about what "belief" means. If, instead of asking Sleeping Beauty about her "subjective probability", you asked her to place a bet, or take some action, everyone could agree what the best answer was. That it perplexes people is a sign that they're talking non-sense, using words without agreeing on their meanings.

But, we can make it more obvious what the argument is about by using a trick that works with the Monty Hall problem: Add more doors. By doors I mean days.

The Monty Hall Sleeping Beauty Problem is then:

• On Sunday she's given a drug that sends her to sleep for a thousand years, and a coin is tossed.
• If the coin lands heads, Beauty is awakened and interviewed once.
• If the coin comes up tails, she is awakened and interviewed 1,000,000 times.
• After each interview, she's given a drug that makes her fall asleep again and forget she was woken.
• Each time she's woken up, she's asked, "With what probability do you believe that the coin landed tails?"

The halfer position implies that she should still say 1/2 in this scenario.

Does stating it this way make it clearer what the argument is about?

I bought a plastic mat to put underneath my desk chair, to protect the wooden floor from having bits of stone ground into it by the chair wheels. But it kept sliding when I stepped onto it, nearly sending me stumbling into my large, expensive, and fragile monitor. I decided to replace the mat as soon as I found a better one.

Before I found a better one, though, I realized I wasn't sliding on it anymore. My footsteps had adjusted themselves to it.

Over the past couple of decades, I've sent out a few hundred resumes (maybe, I don't know, 300 or 400--my spreadsheet for 2013-2015 lists 145 applications).  Out of those I've gotten at most two dozen interviews and a dozen job offers.

Throughout that time I've maintained a list of references on my resume.  The rest of the resume is, to my mind, not very informative.  The list of job titles and degrees says little about how competent I was.

Now and then, I check with one of my references to see if anyone called them.  I checked again yesterday with the second reference on my list.  The answer was the same:  Nope.  No one has ever, as far as I can recall, called any of my references.  Not the people who interviewed me; not the people who offered me jobs.

When the US government did a background check on me, they asked me for a list of references to contact.  My uncertain recollection is that they ignored it and interviewed my neighbors and other contacts instead, as if what I had given them was a list of people not to bother contacting because they'd only say good things about me.

Is this rational or irrational?  Why does every employer ask for a list of references, then not call them?