Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote:
"No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream state as an intermediate step."
"Nonsense," retorted another voice. "That we find ourselves in a dream state was never assumed; rather, it follows so straightforwardly from the long-nail counterfactual that the derivation could be done, I think, even in an extremely weak system of inference."
The full thing reads like a flash tour of OB/LW, except it was written in 2001.
I think you're misreading the story. It's not an argument in favor of irrationality, it's a horror story. The catch is that it's a good horror story, directed at the rationalist community. Like most good horror stories, it plays off a specific fear of its audience.
You may be immune to the lingering dread created by looking at all those foolish happy people around you and wondering if maybe you are the one doing something wrong. Or the fear that even if you act as rationally as you can, you could still box yourself into a trap you won't be able to think your way back out of. But quite a few of your peers are not so immune. I know I'm not, and that story managed to scare me pretty effectively.
The protagonist isn't an ideal rationalist, and the story isn't trying to assert that this is what the ideal rationalist does. Instead, the protagonist is an adolescent proto-rationalist, of a type many of us are familiar with, with her social instincts sucking her into a trap that a lot of us can understand well enough to dread.
And so there's a reason she thinks and acts like a Hollywood stereotype of an intelligent person is that, especially when they're just barely at the age of being able to really think at all. Where do you think Hollywood got the idea for the stereotype in the first place?
I submit that the reason so many of the average people think intelligent people act that way is because they lose social contact with the geniuses in high school, which is when they do think and act like that.
For a lot of the smartest people, being socially functional is a learned skill that comes late and not easily.
I've upvoted this comment, but I disagree.
What should make this an effective horror story, as you put it, is that it's based on the very real possibility that there are people whose brains are wired in such a way that they can't be happy and rational at the same time. In order to more effectively 'scare' the reader, the author attempts to convince us that this is more than a possibility by making an argument by fictional example, the example being the main character.
My beef with the story is that this example is way too unlikely to be convincing as an arg... (read more)