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What exactly do you mean by mainstream? If you mean accepted by the general population, then I'm guessing not. In fact, as a random individual, I know nothing appsumo AND reddit (I didn't even know appsumo existed until you said they did so in this blog post), so if those things are not mainstream, then I highly doubt "death-is-bad" would become somehow become mainstream by associating with non-mainstream stuff.
Why Would A Certain Hoax Story Be Reported For So Long?
Recently, Tyler Cowen, on his blog, reported a story of a German court case where Demitrius Soupolos sued Frank Maus for "breach of contract". Demitrius paid Maus to do a certain service, which Maus then was unable to deliever. Maus argued that he was only paid to make a good effort on said service but was prevented from doing so (due to an "act of god", as one American legal scholar supposedly claimed). This got me curious: who would win that court case? So I began doing a Google search for more information about this case...only to see that this case has been repeated over and over. Tyler Cowen's blog post links to an article on this case written in March 30th 2009...and that all these other news stories just copy this article, word-for-word. There is no mention of a verdict anywhere in my searches (which I think would be fairly important concerning that this is a court case after all), nor were any of these news articles about Soupolos were written in Germany (where the court case was supposed to be held), leading me to conclude that this is nothing more than a hoax. Now, this may not be a hoax, but I'm fairly confident that it is a hoax.
Tyler made his blog post in March 23rd 2011...so why would this hoax story continue to spread long after 2009? The answer is simple: the context of the story. Frank Maus' service was impregnation of Demitrius' wife, a "beauty queen"*. The "act of god" that prevented Frank Maus for carrying out this service...was the fact that Frank Maus was infertile and didn't know of this infertility because his wife deceived him.
The story seems so weird, strange, and soap operaic when you added in the 'context' that it becomes understandable that somebody may instinctively wish to grapple with the implications of this story as opposed to digging in deeper and questioning the story's inauthenticity (and I must admit, when I was doing my research, I was not intending to question the story but merely wanted to know who won the court case in question). Let's assume that the Maus story is a fake. I have two questions based on that assumption:
1) If someone wants to create a hoax story that is generally accepted by the population (either for purely sadistic entertainment or for more sinister purposes), would he desire to create a story that is weird or unbelievable just to capitalize on the 'weird' factor and get people to accept it? If so, at what level of weirdness or unbelievability?
2) Assuming that a "rational" individual would prefer to have accurate and true information, how does one guard against some prankster using this sort of tactic?
*The excuse given in the story was that Demitrius Soupolos was infertile...but considering that a beauty queen should be someone of means, then Soupolos could have used technological advances such as IVF to deal with the infertility problem. This, alongside the bizzare nature of mentioning the detail of a beauty queen (who, when I did the search, once again bring up repeated copies of the same court case article), as if that is the only important thing about this woman in question, suggests that this is yet another evidence of this being a hoax.
EDIT: According to Douglas Knight, this story had originally started as a article in Jet Magazine, written in 1978. While it doesn't prove that it's not a "hoax", this new piece of evidence does help to explain why I was unable to find anything on Google search relating to the court case (other than repeated copies of the same story).
Well, you won't have to worry about it unless the grandparent hits 5 karma points, that being the threshold I had privately decided on for doing a discussion post following up on the idea. But if it does come to that, care to state your personal odds for the occurrence of your predicted regress?
Throwing up numbers would just be pointless guessing for the sake of pointless guessing, but because of the tight-knit nature of the blog in question (meaning that people here tend to share the same ideas and values concerning rationality), I'd say that the chances of regression for the LessWrong community would be significantly lower than the chances of regression for two random individuals.
In response to
Can we stop using the word "rationalism"?
Suggestion for solution: interested parties taboo "rationality" and privately write a (roughly) three sentence summary of just what it is we think we're about. At a later time, interested parties post their summaries, and then try to pick out common themes and keywords to identify a unique label that doesn't have the name collision problem identified in the OP.
And then, about three minutes later, we'd have to taboo said common keywords and then write a three sentence summary of said keyword and present it to each other in order to pick out common themes and keywords, and repeat this process over and over...and not being able to actually talk about what we were supposed to talk about.
Can't we just argue over what is being done in the name of rationality, rather than arguing over the word "rationality" itself?
In response to
How best to show dying is bad
"More generally, I'd like to figure out how to pierce this sort of argument in a way that makes the person in question actually change his mind."
Since you did post that letter about your Father trying to argue to you in a manner to try and have you change your mind, this raises alarms bells for me.
If both you and your Father is trying to change each others' minds, then there is a possibility that the argument can degenerate: both sides would only treat the other people's arguments as something to swat away, as opposed to something to seriously consider and take into account. If this occurs, then the argument would become futile, neither side will budge on this point, so no persuasion will occur.
That being said, if both you and your Father are arguing in good faith, then there is still a chance of someone being persuaded (either you or your Father). If neither are though, then no persuasion will occur and the argument is futile. Since I am unable to determine which is the case in your OP, I would request a clarification on this point.
In response to
Willpower: not a limited resource?
"Much recent research suggests that willpower—the capacity to exert self-control—is a limited resource that is depleted after exertion."
Instead of taking this research at face value, shouldn't we wait for new experiments to verify their findings? I am afraid of people just accepting this experiment, and ignoring the many OTHER experiments that said otherwise.
In response to
There is no such thing as pleasure
"If there are people who do experience a definite thing common to all enjoyable experiences, this might be one reason for the attraction, to some, of utilitarian theories -- even for taking some sort of utilitarianism to be obviously, trivially true."
People do find a definite thing common to all enjoyable experiences: they enjoy them.
Your comment raises a good point though: it would be very hard to measure one sort of enjoyment with another, especially between the "carnal pleasures" and the "intellectual pleasures", which both produce enjoyment...but how much? Without a way of measuring pleasure, you're left with subjective judgement, which may be of little use.
In response to
A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
"Germany should completely lose all the baggage of Nazism and replace it with a completely democratic society that has no causal linkage whatsoever to its bloody past."
General Y is advocating for an absolute bastardization of history as much as General F. You cannot deny the past, because the past shaped your country and what your country did. There is a difference between interpreting the "real" meaning of Nazism, and actually erasing Nazism from history, as General Y wants.
General Y also want to place all blame on the the Nazi regime, thereby excusing the rest of the German population for actually supporting the National Socialists to begin with! You aren't dealing with "militant nationalism" here at all. You're dealing with HUMAN BEINGS.
Finally, General F could argue that de-Nazification could get out of control, leading to the rise of left wing terrorist groups who argued you haven't done enough de-Nazification and the only way to remove the "Nazi taint" is to destroy capitalism entirely and surrender to the Soviet Union.
This just puts me off being utilitarian to be honest.
Understandably so, because the outside view says that most such sacrifices for the greater good end up having been the result of bad epistemology and unrealistic assessments of the costs and benefits.
Strong rationality means that you'd be able to get away with such an act. But strong rationality also means that you generally have better methods of achieving your goals than dubious plans involving sacrifice. When you end thinking you have to do something intuitively morally objectionable 'for the greater good' then you should have tons of alarm bells going off in your head screaming out 'have you really paid attention to the outside view here?!'.
In philosophical problems, you might still have a dilemma. But in real life, such tradeoffs just don't come up on an individual level where you have to actually do the deed. Some stock traders might be actively profiting by screwing everyone over, but they don't have to do anything that would feel wrong in the EEA. The kinds of objections you hear against consequentialism are always about actions that feel wrong. Why not a more realistic example that doesn't directly feed off likely misplaced intuitions?
Imagine you're a big time banker whose firm is making tons of money off of questionably legal mortgage loans that you know will blow up in the economy's face, but you're donating all your money to a prestigious cancer research institute. You've done a very thorough analysis of the relative literature and talked to many high status doctors, and they say that with a couple billion dollars a cure to cancer is in sight. You know that when the economy blows up it will lead to lots of jobless folk without the ability to remortgage their homes. Which is sad, and you can picture all those homeless middle class people and their kids, depressed and alone, all because of you. But cancer is a huge bad ugly cause of death, and you can also picture all of those people that wouldn't have to go through dialysis and painful treatments only to die painfully anyway. Do you do the typically immoral and questionably illegal thing for the greater good?
Why isn't the above dilemma nearly as forceful an argument against consequentialism? Is it because it doesn't appeal in the same way to your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice? Then that might be evidence that your evolutionarily adapted sense of justice wasn't meant for rational moral judgement.
You would likely have to, for the simple reason that if Cancer gets cured, more resources can be dedicated to dealing with other diseases, meaning even more lives will be saved in the process (on top of those lives saved due to the curing of Cancer).
The economy can be in shambles for a while, but it can recover in the future, unlike cancer patients..and you could always justifying it that if a banker like you could blow up the economy, it was already too weak in the first place: better to blow it up now when the damage can be limited rather than latter.
Though the reason it doesn't appeal is because you don't quote hard numbers, making the consequentalist rely on "value" judgements when doing his deeds...and different consequentalists have different "values". Your consequentalist would be trying to cure cancer by crashing the economy to raise money for a cancer charity, while a different consequentalist could be embezzling money from that same cancer charity in an attempt to save the economy from crashing.
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What do you mean by calling yourself "a random individual"? It is generally not a good sampling technique to survey people who step forward and volunteer information.
You're right, it isn't a good sampling technique. When I said "random individual" though, I wanted to state some sort of distance from the LessWrong Community. It is very possible that most people in that community know of appsumo and reddit, but since I'm outside of that community, I knew nothing about it. I suppose, in retrospect, I should have said "outsider" instead, and I also realize that the extent of an outsider's knowledge likely doesn't have any relevance here for this topic.