Hello, my name is Luke. I'm an urban planning graduate student at Cleveland State University, having completed an undergrad in philosophy at the University of New Hampshire a year ago. It was the coursework I did at that school which lead me to be interested in the nebulous and translucent topic of rationality, and I'm happy to see so many people involved and interested in the same conversations I'd spend hours having with classmates. Heck, the very question I was asking myself in something of an ontological sense--am I missing the trees for the forest--is what led me here, specifically to Eliezer's article on the fallacies of compression, which was somewhat helpful. Suffice to say, I tend to think I'm not missing the trees for the forest, and that in fact the original form of the idiom remains true for most other people, though thankfully, not many here.

I'm deeply interested in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and metaethics, all of which I attempt to approach in systemic ways. As for what led me to consider myself a rationalist in these endeavors...I'm not sure I do. In fact, I'm not sure anyone can or should think of themselves a rationalist, considering that basic beliefs, other than solipsism, are inductive and inferential, and thus fallible. We could argue in circles forever (as others have) what constitutes knowledge, but any definition seems, in my view, to be arbitrary and thus non-universal and therefore, again, fallible--even mathematical knowledge and formal logic.

Granted, I don't sit in a corner rocking back and forth sucking my thumb, driven mad by the uncertainty of it all, but I also operate with the knowledge that whatever I deem rational behavior and thought processes only seem rational because I've pre-decided what constitutes rational behavior (i.e., circularity, or coherentism at best...feeling like I'm writing a duplicate of a different post). Of course, all that seems like too easy an exit from a number of hard problems, so I keep reading to make sure that, in fact, I oughtn't be rocking back and forth in a corner sucking my thumb for the utility of it, turning into a kind of utility monster. An absurdist I remain, but one with a pretty strong intuitive consequentialist metaethical framework which allows me to find great joy in the topics covered on LW.

It seems as though just about all knowledge is inherently coherentist. There is no position outside of myself and my associated framework of knowledge-claiming processes from which I can claim knowledge. How I claim to know what I claim to know will always depend on the way in which I came to claim to know what I know (sorry, wordy). That certainly needn't be circular, but it does seem to make a lie out of point (2) of Feldman's modest foundationalism.

Going back to Descartes, any non-solipsistic knowledge claims are only considered simple JTB assuming standard conditions for observation, i.e. even assuming a realist position, all knowledge is fundamentally inferential and inductive, even formal logic and mathematic. The odds that both formal logic and mathematics are true and not some trick played on the mechanics of the universe seem good, but of course, even that is an inductive inference. All systems which are deserving of the name are coherent and self-consistent, and some are even consistent with other systems, but I am at least unaware, of a system which is consistent and coherent with all other systems, i.e., contains all other systems....Oh boy, getting into the universal set problem. Sorry 'bout that.

Sure, but "It can't be stated in a mathematical framework that already does a good job of answering a lot of these questions, maybe we should try to adopt it so it can be, or maybe we should conclude that the idea really is confused if we have other information indicating it has problems, or maybe we should wait until experts have hashed out a bit more exactly what they mean and come back to the idea then" are not the same thing as just throwing an idea out because it isn't mathematically precise.

I think in general that LW should pay more attention to mainstream philosophy. I find it interesting how often people on LW don't realize how much of the standard positions here overlap with Quine's positions, and he's clearly mainstream. It is possible that people on LW overestimate the usefulness of the "can this be mathematicized?" question, but that doesn't stop it from being a very useful question to ask.

Sorry to make my first post on LW a political one, but I've been hearing too much about this discussion everywhere to stay out of it, here. I'll try to keep it short.

ChrisHallquist: I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.

Quite honestly, I think this is a confused concern, or at least a misplaced one.

I'm a philosopher by education (again, my apologies), but an urban economist/macroeconomist by trade and hobby. I don't think I'm saying anything new or surprising in mentioning that, as industrial economic growth decline, and economic growth shifts to less labor-intensive service industries, there begins a decline the growth rate of the employment-population ratio. Assuming the typical level of population growth rate decline associate with this economic transition (i.e. Western Europe/North America fertility levels, not East Asian/European fertility levels), you end up with a large ratio of low-wage/high-wage laborers. Because people respond intuitively to the two population segments with more visibly-dispersed levels of income, by claiming that this is unjust, you start to get a popular movement for social welfare. The confusion/frivolousness should be becoming somewhat apparent.

The income dispersion which is a product of the development of the economic system which created it cannot be solved by that same system; this is what leads to calls for things like living wages and other types of income redistribution--or even just labor welfare generally--through government intervention. However, these interventions in a market built around the production of capital only serve to reduce its efficiency by introducing new inflexibilities in the market, e.g., if I'm looking to start up a restaurant, I can only do so provided I have enough money to satisfy OSHA regulations. If I don't have enough money to do so, I can't begin to produce capital through food service, which not only deprives me of profit, but deprives local workers of (theoretically) sharing in that profit. When economic growth slows and population growth doesn't, it's bad for everyone.

I'm pretty strongly socialist, but I'm willing to admit social welfare and capitalism simply don't go together...though maybe that's less surprising than it seems to me.

I suppose this just hits on the fact that I agree with what a few other people here have said: I don't think that people who are genuine libertarian capitalists can actually have conversations about socioeconomics with non-libertarian socialists. We have different consequences we're trying to reach, and knowing that, we can move on and not worry about convincing each other. Frankly, it leads me to respect libertarians totally, even if I absolutely disagree with them.

But American liberals, and most European social democrats, are inconsistent. Whether or not they know it, they believe that human welfare (whatever their preferred sources of utility are) is Good, but they refuse to use a system that produces it because they believe that system--socialism--is Bad, though in their defense, it's mostly because they misunderstand what socialism actually is (not that I'll lay claim to an absolute understanding). Because the morality they use is deontological in nature, you end up with people creating rules AND goals (the latter because humans are planning things), separately and simultaneously(ish), instead of deciding on one starting point and letting what comes naturally happen without interference.