And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don’t value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they’ll pay lip service but they’ll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it.
Except that they do likely value true beliefs at least on a subset of questions. For example, were you to encounter an engineer or another person who engages with easily verifiable questions, verification of questions related to the person’s area of expertise would be useful in order to, say, prevent a friend from making a high-stakes mistake or to lower a rival’s status for making such a mistake. Hard-to-verify questions like politics, management or philosophy had rationalistsdescribeproblems causing the humans to fail to learn behaving rationally.
I think that your confusions could be reframed as follows. The humans aren’t born awakened to reasoning in rational ways, they reach the state by, for example, reading Yudkowsky’s texts, practicing to think rationally, etc. However, most people can be awakened to reason in these ways during making important decisions (e.g. this might happen naturally in their expertise areas) and do vibes-based reasoning in other contexts. On the other hand, there exist antipatterns like the ones which you describe above (e.g. filtering conjectures for being harmful to minorities) and which could deserve being hunted down.
Except that they do likely value true beliefs at least on a subset of questions. For example, were you to encounter an engineer or another person who engages with easily verifiable questions, verification of questions related to the person’s area of expertise would be useful in order to, say, prevent a friend from making a high-stakes mistake or to lower a rival’s status for making such a mistake. Hard-to-verify questions like politics, management or philosophy had rationalists describe problems causing the humans to fail to learn behaving rationally.
I think that your confusions could be reframed as follows. The humans aren’t born awakened to reasoning in rational ways, they reach the state by, for example, reading Yudkowsky’s texts, practicing to think rationally, etc. However, most people can be awakened to reason in these ways during making important decisions (e.g. this might happen naturally in their expertise areas) and do vibes-based reasoning in other contexts. On the other hand, there exist antipatterns like the ones which you describe above (e.g. filtering conjectures for being harmful to minorities) and which could deserve being hunted down.