This is where the divide between epistemic vs. instrumental rationality is so important. If you truly practice instrumental rationality, none of this even enters into the discussion. You should not have to pay any social cost for being rational vs. not being so.
It sounds as if you think either that an instrumentally rational person will not disclose beliefs that have social cost, or that they will change their social situation so that their group doesn’t assign social cost to those beliefs. The former is insufficient if you value improving the rationality of people you know; The latter is extremely slow and highly susceptible to external influences.
To me your claim just defines ‘instrumentally rational’ so narrowly that there would be no instrumentally rational people in existence. I don’t find that useful.
He mentioned the example of being trapped in the southern US, surrounded by a bunch of Bible-thumping hicks. Trying to increase the rationality of the people around you in that environment through conventional means is dangerous. (This is where I currently live, with too little power to escape. I’m fortunate in that, whenever I did something weird, it’d get attributed to being somehow related to my visual impairment, so instead of getting the treatment given to less unacceptable targets, I just got isolation and being treated more like a goofy pet. People without disability as a shield have been subject to open scorn, newspaper campaigns, occasionally open protests pushing people out of town (this is more for opposing religious practices than anything rational); this town is a bit more progressive than some surrounding areas (it’s in that spot where it wants to stay a small rural town even though it’s huge locally and gradually urbanizing), so you don’t get literal torches and pitchforks or lynch mobs, but it’s still costly to do something as simple as, say, be an Earth science teacher.)
(There was actually a local skeptics/atheists meetup group at one time, when I first discovered meetup.com. Before I could get over the combination signalling costs/needing to ask for a ride anxiety, it disappeared and I have been unable to find it since. IIRC, there might have been as many as three people involved.)
All of which is to say, the article knows what it’s talking about.
I understand that there are situations in which you definitely do not want to show how relatively rational you are.
But there are also situations where bad outcomes are unlikely. At some point you’ve gotta say “the risk is low enough and the potential gain is great enough that I’ll do this thing.”, because it’s hard to get more rational on your own.
Have you interpreted my comment as a comment on the article rather than passive_fist’s comment? Personally I think the OP is competently written and reasonably accurate.
The problem was with passive_fist’s excessively simplified representation of what it means to be instrumentally rational (as a human being with complex values, rather than a paperclip optimizer with simple values).
Have you interpreted my comment as a comment on the article rather than passive_fist’s comment?
Yes. And I embarrass myself again. At least this time I can blame it on not being able to see the formatting? On rereading, your comment makes sense as a reply to Passive_fist’s, and I don’t know how I managed to miss that the first time through.
No, because social costs aren’t the only costs, and instrumental rationality should be about all your values, and the most important ones first.
The OP hit the real instrumentally rational move; find more compatible companions who value and reinforce your fundamental values. One of the compliments I’ve cherished over the years was “You’re weird, but in the right way.”
This is where the divide between epistemic vs. instrumental rationality is so important. If you truly practice instrumental rationality, none of this even enters into the discussion. You should not have to pay any social cost for being rational vs. not being so.
It sounds as if you think either that an instrumentally rational person will not disclose beliefs that have social cost, or that they will change their social situation so that their group doesn’t assign social cost to those beliefs. The former is insufficient if you value improving the rationality of people you know; The latter is extremely slow and highly susceptible to external influences.
To me your claim just defines ‘instrumentally rational’ so narrowly that there would be no instrumentally rational people in existence. I don’t find that useful.
He mentioned the example of being trapped in the southern US, surrounded by a bunch of Bible-thumping hicks. Trying to increase the rationality of the people around you in that environment through conventional means is dangerous. (This is where I currently live, with too little power to escape. I’m fortunate in that, whenever I did something weird, it’d get attributed to being somehow related to my visual impairment, so instead of getting the treatment given to less unacceptable targets, I just got isolation and being treated more like a goofy pet. People without disability as a shield have been subject to open scorn, newspaper campaigns, occasionally open protests pushing people out of town (this is more for opposing religious practices than anything rational); this town is a bit more progressive than some surrounding areas (it’s in that spot where it wants to stay a small rural town even though it’s huge locally and gradually urbanizing), so you don’t get literal torches and pitchforks or lynch mobs, but it’s still costly to do something as simple as, say, be an Earth science teacher.)
(There was actually a local skeptics/atheists meetup group at one time, when I first discovered meetup.com. Before I could get over the combination signalling costs/needing to ask for a ride anxiety, it disappeared and I have been unable to find it since. IIRC, there might have been as many as three people involved.)
All of which is to say, the article knows what it’s talking about.
I understand that there are situations in which you definitely do not want to show how relatively rational you are.
But there are also situations where bad outcomes are unlikely. At some point you’ve gotta say “the risk is low enough and the potential gain is great enough that I’ll do this thing.”, because it’s hard to get more rational on your own.
Have you interpreted my comment as a comment on the article rather than passive_fist’s comment? Personally I think the OP is competently written and reasonably accurate.
The problem was with passive_fist’s excessively simplified representation of what it means to be instrumentally rational (as a human being with complex values, rather than a paperclip optimizer with simple values).
Yes. And I embarrass myself again. At least this time I can blame it on not being able to see the formatting? On rereading, your comment makes sense as a reply to Passive_fist’s, and I don’t know how I managed to miss that the first time through.
No, because social costs aren’t the only costs, and instrumental rationality should be about all your values, and the most important ones first.
The OP hit the real instrumentally rational move; find more compatible companions who value and reinforce your fundamental values. One of the compliments I’ve cherished over the years was “You’re weird, but in the right way.”