But rationality is not one terminal value among love, harmony and many other. It is instrumental to reaching almost any value. If your terminal value is love or harmony, you still have to make tricky decisions on a regular basis, and without an accurate map of reality you risk taking the wrong decisions. Truth is not some feel-good notion, it’s the thing that you ignore at your own risks.
But that is what will happen, once you lose sight of truth-seeking.
Back to antiquity, the virtue of prudentia has been recognised as the foundation upon which all other virtues stand. You cannot achieve anything unless you know what efforts will proceed towards that end, nor direct your efforts towards the good unless you can discern what is good.
The modern word “prudence” has a much more limited meaning than prudentia, but we have another word for it: “rationality”.
Alas, sometimes truth makes it harder to find love and harmony, since truth can break social reality. I’m not saying that maybe after that breakage there isn’t a rebuilding that’s possible that would maybe even lead to more love and harmony, but it sometimes requires passing through a trough of less love and harmony, and many people refuse to do anything other than follow gradients to local maxima.
It’s true in theory that rationality is whatever helps you achieve your goals, but in practice the rationality community just does a lot of logic and conscious analysis. It’s a bunch of people who already think too much dedicating themselves to thinking even more, which is usually a mistake.
It wouldn’t have taken much of a shift for evolution to make us all hyper-logical and good at avoiding logical fallacies. Instead, it seems like evolution put those logical fallacies there in the first place because (for a being with bounded computation) the way normal non-rationalists think is a more rational way of thinking than the dominant LessWrong mode of thinking, most of the time. (In the sense that rationality is winning.)
I don’t think that’s what happened. I think evolution put us on the path to understanding the world around us. We became better at it that any other living being. Then at some point (recently from our point of view), culture became the driving force behind our progress. Without culture, maybe we’d have evolved to be better at avoiding logical fallacies, like you say, or maybe not. But evolution is too slow compared to culture, so from our historical point of view, our genome is stopped halfway towards rationality and if we want to get better we have to learn it individually. That doesn’t mean being halfway rational is an evolutionary optimum.
But rationality is not one terminal value among love, harmony and many other. It is instrumental to reaching almost any value. If your terminal value is love or harmony, you still have to make tricky decisions on a regular basis, and without an accurate map of reality you risk taking the wrong decisions.
Truth is not some feel-good notion, it’s the thing that you ignore at your own risks.
It isn’t exactly safe for humans to ignore love and harmony, either.
But that is what will happen, once you lose sight of truth-seeking.
Back to antiquity, the virtue of prudentia has been recognised as the foundation upon which all other virtues stand. You cannot achieve anything unless you know what efforts will proceed towards that end, nor direct your efforts towards the good unless you can discern what is good.
The modern word “prudence” has a much more limited meaning than prudentia, but we have another word for it: “rationality”.
Did you plan to elaborate? Otherwise this looks a lot like an applause light.
Alas, sometimes truth makes it harder to find love and harmony, since truth can break social reality. I’m not saying that maybe after that breakage there isn’t a rebuilding that’s possible that would maybe even lead to more love and harmony, but it sometimes requires passing through a trough of less love and harmony, and many people refuse to do anything other than follow gradients to local maxima.
It’s true in theory that rationality is whatever helps you achieve your goals, but in practice the rationality community just does a lot of logic and conscious analysis. It’s a bunch of people who already think too much dedicating themselves to thinking even more, which is usually a mistake.
It wouldn’t have taken much of a shift for evolution to make us all hyper-logical and good at avoiding logical fallacies. Instead, it seems like evolution put those logical fallacies there in the first place because (for a being with bounded computation) the way normal non-rationalists think is a more rational way of thinking than the dominant LessWrong mode of thinking, most of the time. (In the sense that rationality is winning.)
I don’t think that’s what happened. I think evolution put us on the path to understanding the world around us. We became better at it that any other living being. Then at some point (recently from our point of view), culture became the driving force behind our progress. Without culture, maybe we’d have evolved to be better at avoiding logical fallacies, like you say, or maybe not. But evolution is too slow compared to culture, so from our historical point of view, our genome is stopped halfway towards rationality and if we want to get better we have to learn it individually. That doesn’t mean being halfway rational is an evolutionary optimum.