We don’t want to minimax since we aren’t playing a zero sum game. We just want to maximize expected utility with a few caveats and with a few blanks filled in.
MichaelVassar
More recently, rationalist has tended to have a meaning closer to its current one, but with strong negative affect associated with it. Peter Drucker, for instance, seems to use it as a term of reproach in “Adventures of a Bystander”, to mean the sort of small souled narrow-minded person who thinks that they can be right and others wrong and are allowed to say so because they have reasons for their beliefs instead of having made them up to express feelings but the assumption is that one shouldn’t do this because doing it leads to communism, fascism, or other forms of authoritarianism. If people don’t have the right to believe what they want then some authority must have the right to tell them what to believe. Traditional conservatives can associate this attitude with communism and other badness. Basically, rationalism is used to mean affiliation with authoritarian regimes who claim the prestige of science.
I think I’ll second that, though the attitude that there’s an exact right amount to update on every piece of information is really important too.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
Is this really controversial among rationalists?
Do you really deny that there are probably benefits, given limits to average human condition, to at least some hard legal lines corresponding to continuous realities?
Disbelief in the latter is of course why SIAI exists. The latter may however be true for human rationalists with average personalities. Even if it was only true for average personalities AMONG those who became rationalists this community would make sense.
Probably though we should assume that evolution built people to cooperate about the right amount for their ancestral environment, neither too much nor too little, and that cultures then promoted excess cooperation from a gene’s eye view because your tendency towards cooperation has larger benefits to me than costs to you so I will pay more to create it than you will to avoid it.
I rate fairly poorly by these metrics. That makes me suspect that people like me also do. I see that this comment has been poorly rated and hope that people haven’t rated it poorly for being unflattering. If you have done this, please rate it back up, OK.
I think that this resembles the MMPI methodology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personality_Inventory
I think Tim Ferris was going to display this ability as the theme of a TV show.
Sadly, the unexpected frequently gets translated into the expected, even to the point of explicit denials of a position being ignored repeatedly in a single conversation.
The inventors of the original form of rationalist virtue AND rhetoric sure didn’t think that the latter was a dark art. Rationalists should WIN!
Please stick with “he”.
I agree that it’s imperfect, but inelegance matters.
So from my and Omega’s perspective this coin is random and my behavior is predictable. Amusing. My question: What if Omega says “due to quirks in your neurology, had I requested it, you would have pre-committed to bet $100 against $46.32. As it happens, you lost anyway, but you would have taken an unfavorable deal. Would you pay then?
I think that this is a critical point, worthy of a blog post of its own. Impossible possible worlds are a confusion.
The inclination to trade with fiction seems like a serious problem within this community.
But just “intelligence is useful” takes people farther than many intelligent people get. Seriously.
How about Scooby Doo? It’s elementary, but I spent a lot of time on it back when I was 3-4 and would have continued watching for somewhat longer if they hadn’t started introducing stories where the magic WAS real.
The moral “it’s ALWAYS natural” and the extremely repetitive plots (repetition is, I suspect, very good for kids) are basic but definitely positive.
Only saw one or two episodes, but I think Kimba the White Lion may also have had positive but elementary rationalist messages.
I really hope that we all think that developing better techniques for rationality is more important than sparing people spoilers in their fiction.
But the Skeptics aren’t even very good traditional rationalists. They are just a step up from the Objectivists and four or five steps up from mainstream America.
The question is about when you started looking for sometimes lonely truth in places where people normally look for affiliation.