I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.
I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.