Are you a meat-eater?

The problem is, excessively liking propositional knowledge over procedural is a bias that harms us every day. Though some information is directly useful, most of it is worthless.

Worthless to whom?

Passionate truth-seekers find enjoyment in their growing ability to see things as they are, in making the world make sense. It's an autotelic activity for them. If the value sought is simply to understand a phenomenon, it's not worthless.

Some people like watching TV; some people like reading about comonads. If you don't starve to death because of it, and if there is nothing else you'd rather be doing than the task in question, fine! Go for it.

Harm to whom?

The harm seems to appear when you have an objective goal, project or task which is important from the perspective of your utility function, and then you jeopardize deadline or quality by avoiding to follow the required steps to complete it.

You don't work objectively from the perspective of the end-product, consuming theory as necessary; instead, you diverge aimlessly. It may be a sign of risk-aversion and need for control — you can never screw up too much by reading books.

In any case, harm should be viewed in the light of your utility function.

I think lot of people indirectly follow the things written in the post--I certainly do. What we actually try to do all the time is: Not try to control things which cannot be, we have to accept certain things are beyond us, and we deal with things which we think we can deal with, isn't it?

Comes a day, when a creationist is hell bent on having a debate to prove how rationalists/biologists are ignorant, and that day, we will send a college-student-rationalist--there is no need to go out there and bat for Darwin, but we would act in defense if required to.

From the OP: do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.

--Eliezer (http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/)

Few quotes from the article:

"Bananas were created by God for human enjoyment, for why else would they come in such convenient cases?"

"...Am I to hope that, in the hereafter, a rationalist God will reward me for having the intellectual integrity not to believe in Him?".....

...Right, but if the only reason it works is that you believe it works, then how can it work if you know it only works because you believe it works?"...

..."Richard Dawkins, the biologist, was once asked about a study claiming that the devout live longer on average than atheists. He replied that, even if that were so, he'd rather know the truth about where he came from and die early than live longer under a fantasy."

. .... "In other words: the stupider, more ignorant, more irrational you can prove you are, the better the chance you have of winning".

When Douglas Yates wrote that "people who are sensible about love are incapable of it," he might have added a footnote: "the Darwinian explanation for this fact arises from certain paradoxes of rationality in games played by agents known to each other to have bounded computational capacity."

Also having a webcast would be even better, though. Combine a webcast and, say, an IRC room, and you create a chance for the people online to discuss the speeches as they happen, fostering a community feel.

(In TransVision 06, we had that, and used a video projector to broadcast the IRC discussion to one of the walls in the room where the actual presentation was held. That led to some interactivity between the online participants and the people physical present, as comments originally made in IRC made their way to the physical world. We also included questions from online participants in the questions & answers sections of the talks.

Is there a webcast of the same for the people around the world?

I don't know if it is appropriate to even post this thing, but I didn't find a single thread which talks about the kind of music people in this forum listen to. Has it ever happened that you have used rationality to decide the kind of music you should be listening to? Like all the other things, even listening to music needs "training" (the ears in this case). Music is art-form, so can it be quantified? One might get the same satisfaction listen to MJ or Pat Metheny. But if it happens that you have to choose only two records to listen to for the rest of your life, can rationality help there?