Nate_Rausch
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Nate_Rausch has not written any posts yet.
Nate_Rausch has not written any posts yet.
Well, yes, but couldn't one just make a new religion without those attributes. For example the first of the 10 commandments could be: Question everything, including these texts. Be a student, not a follower. Finding fault in ourself is the highest virtue, free speech etc. ? :-)
Fair point, well I don't think romantic love is worthy of sacred status in the irrationality religion. Tough those four neither seemed quite to fit the love I had in mind.
Perhaps something closer the buddhist concept of bodhisattva, meaning altruistic love for all sentient beings?
A bit tongue-in-cheeck, but how about taking Tyler's unfair label as a proposal?
We could start the rationality religion, without the metaphysics or ideology of ordinary religion. Our God could be everything we do not know. We worship love. Our savior is the truth. We embrace forgiveness as the game-theoretical optimal modified tit-for-tat solution to a repeated game. And so on.
We thoroughly investigate and aggregate the best knowledge humanity currently has on how to live. And we create Rationality Temples worldwide. There will be weekly congregations, with talks on a sequence, with following discussions, on topics such as signalling, bayesian thinking, cognitive biases. We propose a three step way to heaven... (read more)
Well, the "dark arts" might deserve a second look.
We shouldn't pivot too far. Politics clearly is a mind-killer, and exploiting human weaknesses to further your cause is not inherently good.
But I think we have grouped too many things into one basket. In order for rationality to succeed, we must manage to find the balance between being effective and being pure in our ideals.
We do not want to be the stereotypical investment banker, without any morals who will do whatever works. Yet we also don't want to be the environmentalist who don't do anything that works, because people should just care about the environment.
Instead, I think, we need to... (read more)
I was re-reading the meditations of moloch the other day, and it dawned on me that our situation is kind of relevant when it comes to information spreading on the internet.
The current state of competition on the internet seems to be quite clearly in disalignment with what we deem as good, like truth or insight. It feels like we are mid-way towards an equilibrium that is far worse. Unless something is done, we should expect the volume of fake narratives, fake news and lies of all sorts to grow going forward. On the positive side, we should expect to see far more information that confirms with our group's opinions and rattles... (read more)
If you are to exert influence on the world, you have to state your opinions to people. But you also have to be rational about it.
Start with asking yourself:
Let's say the answers in a given scenario are no, yes, person and yes. Convincing another person is hard because of confirmation bias. Added to that is the social dynamics of you telling another person that she is wrong, perhaps while others are listening. Both of... (read more)
Another key difference between startup idea / medican research and financial markets is that the latter is a bounded problem.
It is possible to know every relevant supply and demand-factor regarding a currently priced asset. However, the possible startup ideas now or in the future is probably infinite, or at least many orders of magnitude larger than the space of possible information to know about the pricing of a current asset.
And so, we should and likely do have much less modesty concerning medical research and startup ideas, than we have concerning asset prices.