Twelve virtues of rationality

by Hexstream • 18 years ago

28 17 18 years ago

markbao2• 18 years ago

Some guy went to the Hacker News Coffee Palo Alto (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285623) a few months back and handed out copies of this.

Does anyone know who this was? He looked strikingly similar to Yudkowsky...

Eliezer• 18 years ago

I think that was Yudkowsky.

markbao2• 18 years ago

WTF man? Why didn't you say so? :)

IsaacSchlueter4• 18 years ago

Hm... isn't Yudkowsky's first name Eliezer? ;)

LPTS3• 18 years ago

He listed 7 reasons his worldview was better than yours before covering humility. List ordering fail.

I deny that humility is a virtue and that humility corresponds to rationality.

Also, it's rational to be occasionally irrational, because that instability contributes to beneficial evolutionary changes in the structure of thought.

inimino2• 18 years ago

"It's rational to be occasionally irrational" is an irrational statement. It is rational to be open to new ideas, but that is not irrationality.

LPTS3• 18 years ago

No I mean it's rational to go bat-shit "the lizard men would have gotten me if it weren't for the fairy tucking me into extra dimensions where my entire worldview fell apart like a glass chandelier shattering I feel like I'm dreaming but I'm wide awake get that guy some seizure meds" irrational every now and then.

It's most rational to be able to slide into any degree of irrationality that maximizes the placebo effect and evolutionary change in thought. Thinking is what you put into your brain to cocreate your reality. Irrational thinking can sometimes lead to the creation of a better reality. (It's probably irrational to feel optimistic about your business endeavor, but you're more likely to succeed if you think it anyway.) I mean a lot more then being open to new ideas. I mean having the mental flexibility to slide from completely insane to completely rational intentionally, and using that to create the best reality.

IsaacSchlueter4• 18 years ago

Admitting that you need "evolutionary changes in the structure of thought" IS humility.

He's not talking about Mother Theresa stuff here, but good old fashioned intellectual honesty and curiosity.

dgordon2• 18 years ago

"The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection."

This seems almost to gesture toward a thought I've been tossing around my head lately. If you're basically a conventional person, with a conventional, average view of the world, conventional understanding of morality, and so forth, people who never knew you will look back at you from the future and ask, "How could you think such things? What was wrong with you?" We say it about people in the times when slavery was conventional, when segregation was conventional, when entrenched sexism was conventional, when Nazism was conventional. People will say it about conventions of our time as well, and, I must say, rightfully so.

The only way around this is to give serious and continual examination to the conventions of our time -- to quote John Taylor Gatto, "the great non-thought of received ideas." People of the future, with higher shoulders on which to stand, will probably still find places to criticize you. No one is perfect, and no one can escape entirely the influence of their time and place. But what shows one's commitment to the good is moving toward it -- which, in turn, helps others move toward it.

And the same applies to physics. Every physics major today knows about relativity. That does not make them better physicists than, say, Newton. That credit can only go to those who move conventions -- be they in moral philosophy, or physics, or medicine, or anything else -- not those who follow them, however advanced the conventions they inherit happen to be.

swombat• 18 years ago

Are there virtues to irrationality too? It would be better to balance this article with one that presents the 12 virtues of irrationality...

To get started on this list:

1) Goodness - sometimes the rational choice is not the right choice.

2) Rapidity of execution - it can take hours or even a lifetime to come to a rational decision on some complicated, vaguely defined subjects (such as ethics). The irrational decision engine in your brain can make that decision in a split-second and be right most of the time.

3) Better resilience to incorrect or incomplete data - sometimes, you have incorrect or incomplete data, and no way to correct or complete it. Based on your rational analysis, you may decide to, for instance, refuse to meet someone. And yet, once you actually meet them, you may gather new information that changes your previous rational choice.

There's no doubt many more...

inimino2• 18 years ago

None of those represent virtues of irrationality, but rather common misunderstandings of rationality.

1) If goodness is your goal, rationality lights the path.

2) To engage in a lifetime of cogitation when a split-second decision would be good enough (given your goals) is not rational.

3) Rationality includes making decisions under incomplete information (including the correct assessment of risks). The argument you present here in fact presupposes rationality.

dgordon2• 18 years ago

I don't see why you equate rationality to a brute-force search of the possibility space.

known• 18 years ago

These virtues precede of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Twelve virtues of rationality

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