If something cannot at least in theory be tested by experiment then it has no effect on the world and lacks meaning from a truth stand point therefore rational standpoint.

Better version: …then it has no effect on the world and therefore is not useful to have information about.

As to the rest of your post, I will make a general observation: you are speaking as if epistemic rationality is a terminal value. There's nothing wrong with that (insofar as nobody can say someone else's utility function is wrong) but you might want to think about whether that is what you really want.

The alternative is to allow epistemic rationality to arise from instrumental rationality: obtaining truth is useful insofar as it improves your plans to obtain what you actually want.

I responded with truth trumps happiness and believing the dragon would force you to believe the false belief which is not worth the amount of happiness received by believing it

In the future, I hope you notice this sort of situation and respond by getting curious and engaging with the other person, rather than attempting to win the argument.

Today however Shminux pointed out to me that I held beliefs that were themselves non-falsifiable.

In fact, it's rather worse :) The negation of an unfalsifiable belief is also unfalsifiable - you unfalsifiably believe that Carl's garage does not have an immaterial dragon in it. Even if you make an observation, e.g. you throw a ball to measure the gravitational acceleration, you have an unfalsifiable belief that you have not just hallucinated the whole thing.

timeless physics has a certain beauty

Sure does, but don't let yourself get tempted by the Dark Side. Beauty is not enough, it's the ability to make testable predictions that really matters. And Eliezer's two favorite pets, timeless physics and many worlds, fail miserably by this metric. Maybe some day they will be a stepping stone to something both beautiful and accurate.

I think a main reason why I try to correct friends thought patterns is practice. With friends I get a certain amount of wiggle room, if I accidentally say something that insults them, or turns them off of rationality, or would cause a form a social friction, they would be inclined to tell me before it got between us. I can learn what I did wrong and don't have to keep bothering the same friend to the point of it actually hampering our friendship.

Lessons learned from this can be used to correct someones thought patterns when it is much more imperative for you to do so as in cases where

your ability to accomplish your goals directly depends on their rationality.

and allows you to teach these people whom having social conflict would be very difficult since they are typically people you have to cooperate with a lot.

Remove any confusions you might have about metaethics, figure out what it is you value, estimate what kind of impact the research you want to do will have with respect to what you value, estimate what kind of impact the other things you could do will have with respect to what you value, pick the thing that is more valuable.

Trying to retroactively judge previous research this way is difficult because the relevant quantity you want to estimate is not the observed net value of a given piece of research (which is hard enough to estimate) but the expected net value at the time the decision was being made to do the research. I think the expected value of research into nuclear physics in the past was highly negative because of how much it increased the probability of nuclear war, but I'm not a domain expert and can't give hard numbers to back up this assertion.

Hi there community! My name is Dave. Currently hailing from the front range in Colorado, I moved out here after 5 years with a Chicago non-profit - half as executive director - following a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (four years after being diagnosed with ADHD-I). That was three years ago. Much has happened in the interim, but long story short, I mercilessly began studying what we call AS & anything related I could find. After a particularly brutal first-time experience with hardcore passive-aggressivism (always two sides to every situation, but it doesn't work well when no one will talk about it :P), I became extremely isolated, & have been now for about a year. I'm in my second attempt to return to school via a great community college, but unfortunately the same difficulties as last term are getting in the way.

BUT, that's a different story! I've had this site recommended to me a few times now because over the course of my isolation I've become completely preoccupied with all sorts of fun mental projects, ranging in topics from physics to consciousness to quantum mechanics to dance. My current big projects (I bounce around a loooooot) are creating a linear model for the evolution of cognitive development & showing in some way why I'm not sure i agree that time is the fourth dimension. Oh, also trying to develop a structure for understanding :)

After looking through a few of the welcome threads here, I'm excited to be here! Now all I have to do is keep consistent...

I agree that this is a hard question.

General complaint: sometimes when I say that people should be doing a certain thing, someone responds that doing that thing requires answering hard questions. I don't know what bringing this point up is supposed to accomplish. Yes, many things worth doing require answering hard questions. That is not a compelling reason not to do them.

My preferred method has been to watch court cases on YouTube where it has come out afterword whether the person was guilty or innocent. I watch these videos before i know what the truth is make a prediction and then read what the truth is. In this way I am able to get situations where the person is feeling real emotions and is likely to hide what there feeling with fake emotions.

After practicing like this for about a week i found that i could more easily discern whether people were telling the truth or lying, and it was easier to see what emotions they truly felt.

That's a really cool idea. Did you record your predictions and do a statistical analysis on them to see whether you definitely improved?

But the process of looking at the world, wondering how it works, then figuring out how it works, and then making it work the way you desire, that process carries with it no intrinsic moral qualities.

I don't know what you mean by "intrinsic" moral qualities (is this to be contrasted with "extrinsic" moral qualities, and should I care less about the latter or what?). What I'm saying is just that the decision to pursue some scientific research has bad consequences (whether or not you intend to publicize it: doing it increases the probability that it will get publicized one way or another).