I just imagined a possible April Fools article that I am too lazy to actually write, but the idea is that it would announce a new (fictional) feature of the Less Wrong website—you can write posts and comments using two different colors: everything written in black is supposed to be epistemically rational, and everything written in blue is supposed to be instrumentally rational. The new rule is that you should upvote black texts if they are true, and downvote them if they are false, but you should upvote blue texts if they are useful to believe, and downvote them if they are harmful to believe. So it is okay to write something like “Jesus loves you and has a personal plan for you” as long as you write it in blue font. By using both colors, we can achieve the epistemic and instrumental rationality at the same time. (There is a new option in settings for the post-rationalists that sets blue as their default font color.)
I just imagined a possible April Fools article that I am too lazy to actually write, but the idea is that it would announce a new (fictional) feature of the Less Wrong website—you can write posts and comments using two different colors: everything written in black is supposed to be epistemically rational, and everything written in blue is supposed to be instrumentally rational. The new rule is that you should upvote black texts if they are true, and downvote them if they are false, but you should upvote blue texts if they are useful to believe, and downvote them if they are harmful to believe. So it is okay to write something like “Jesus loves you and has a personal plan for you” as long as you write it in blue font. By using both colors, we can achieve the epistemic and instrumental rationality at the same time. (There is a new option in settings for the post-rationalists that sets blue as their default font color.)