Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
A little of both. Her point is that human brains have a tendency to confuse "is" and "ought", mixing the moral or preferential with the actual, thereby clouding the issue.
If you don't want it to be raining, then feeling or protesting that it shouldn't be happening is an error. But it's an error that human brains commonly make, because our genes wish us to signal our disapproval of things we find objectionable, so that others will be persuaded to behave differently.
The problem is that reality isn't going to behave differently because you think it should, and most of the time even people aren't going to behave differently just because you think they should. Protesting that something should or shouldn't be a particular way is generally a non-helpful response to things as they are: if you want to change how things are, that change can only be made to happen in the future. At the present moment, things simply are how they are, and there is nothing you can do about that without using a time machine. (Even then, the change will still have to happen in your subjective future!)
The reason this passage uses "raining" is that it's a relatively innocuous example to introduce the problems involved in "arguing with reality", in a non-controversial way. Most of the subjects touched on in the rest of the book are things that people usually feel much more strongly about... and therefore have even more reason to separate "is" and "ought" about. (Like, "my spouse should listen to me", to stick to a still relatively-innocuous example.)
I'm not sure I see the problem the quotation is attacking then. Allowing for the very real possibility that I'm oblivious or live in a bubble, my model of how people work has them understanding the difference between "ought" and "expected" most of the time.
I get the impression that there is a real insight here into how people think about the world, but there's a disconnect between the idea and the author's words that I'm not bridging.