In the Robin Hanson tradition, whenever I think that I have figured out a flaw in Kant’s reasoning, I halt, recognize that he lived until he was 79 and spent everyday of his life thinking about these sorts of things and taking long walks. It is good to question him, but also to be humble and research any extant rebuttals to one’s own argument.
There is a good overview of Kant here: http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/intro/Kant_ethics.html
and more at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kant had a peculiar obsession with what rational and reasoning actors would choose to do and what would happen if all people say rationality and reason as definitive tools. Why there is so much resistance to delving into Kant in the Less Wrong community is beyond me.
-from Eliezer’s quoted article Here
I don’t know if you read the entire body of my comment bringing up Kant, but it rests on asking if there was a similarity in Eliezer’s argument and Kants with a question mark at the end.
Both Eliezer and Kant seem to think that this abstract thing called “trust” suffers when individuals choose to lie for their own purposes. Both of them suggest that individuals who believe this would benefit from adopting a maxim that they should not lie.
Eliezer states in the comments that you can lie to people who aren’t part of your community of rational or potentially rational individuals.
Kant says that you can’t lie to people, even if they aren’t part of your club.
You don’t need the CI to reach either of these conclusions; the comment points out that you could do this on Utilitarian grounds. Utilitarian reasoning might even support Kants “don’t like to anyone ever” over Eliezer’s conceptions.
As for arguing Kant leading to a dead end, there is plenty of contemporary philosophy that still uses a lot of Kant and even NPOV Wikipedia has a section detailing Kant in contemporary philosophy.
I am always of the mind that saying that someone’s assumptions are wrong doesn’t lead to their argument having no value ever for any future discussion. In this particular case we got to use a Kantian thought experiment to talk about what looks like a variation on Kantian logic. I’m sorry I used the K word.
The idea of everyone on LW believing that Kant was almost totally wrong and that we should completely discard him is a little unsettling to me. There is a much larger community out there that accepts elements of Kant’s arguments and methods and still applies them; I would again push a Robin Hanson line by suggesting that most rationalists are elsewhere and we should work harder to find them.