However, if this is really what ‘postrationality’ is about, then I think it remains safe to say that it is a poisonous and harmful philosophy that has no place on LW or in the rationality project.
It feels like calling someone’s philosophy poisonous and harmful doesn’t advance the conversation, regardless of its truth value, and this proves the point of the main post well.
Advancing the conversation is not the only reason I would write such a thing, but actually it serves a different purpose: protecting other readers of this site from forming a false belief that there’s some kind of consensus here that this philosophy is not poisonous and harmful. Now the reader is aware that there is at least debate on the topic.
It doesn’t prove the OP’s point at all. The OP was about beliefs (and “making sense of the world”). But I can have the belief “postrationality is poisonous and harmful” without having to post a comment saying so, therefore whether such a comment would advance the conversation need not enter into forming that belief, and is in fact entirely irrelevant.
Yep. In isolation I would be unhappy about this sentence, but given the context I think it’s advancing the conversation by expressing a viewpoint about what has been said so we can discuss how the ideas presented are perceived.
It feels like calling someone’s philosophy poisonous and harmful doesn’t advance the conversation, regardless of its truth value, and this proves the point of the main post well.
Two points:
Advancing the conversation is not the only reason I would write such a thing, but actually it serves a different purpose: protecting other readers of this site from forming a false belief that there’s some kind of consensus here that this philosophy is not poisonous and harmful. Now the reader is aware that there is at least debate on the topic.
It doesn’t prove the OP’s point at all. The OP was about beliefs (and “making sense of the world”). But I can have the belief “postrationality is poisonous and harmful” without having to post a comment saying so, therefore whether such a comment would advance the conversation need not enter into forming that belief, and is in fact entirely irrelevant.
Yep. In isolation I would be unhappy about this sentence, but given the context I think it’s advancing the conversation by expressing a viewpoint about what has been said so we can discuss how the ideas presented are perceived.
If a philosophy is poisonous and harmful, I think it commendable and necessary to say so.