Thank you for the feed back! I am of course happy for people to copy over the essay
> Is this saying that human’s goals and options (including options that come to mind) change depending on the environment, so rational choice theory doesn’t apply?
More or less, yes, or at least that it becomes very hard to apply it in a way that isn’t either highly subjective or essentially post-hoc arguing about what you ought to have done (hidden information/hindsight being 20⁄20)
> This is currently all I have time for; however, my current understanding is that there is a common interpretation of Yudowsky’s writings/The sequences/LW/etc that leads to an over-reliance on formal systems that will invevitably fail people. I think you had this interpretation (do correct me if I’m wrong!), and this is your “attempt to renegotiate rationalism ”.
I’ve definitely met people who take the more humble/humility/heuristics driven approach which I outline in the essay and still call themselves rationalists. On the other hand, I have also seen a whole lot of people take it as some kind of mystic formula to organise their lives around. I guess my general argument is that rationalism should not be constructed on top of such a formal basis (cf. the section about heuristics not theories in the essay) and then “watered down” to reintroduce ideas of humility or nuance or path-dependence. And in part 2 I argue that the core principles of rationalism as I see them (without the “watering down” of time and life experience) make it easy to fall down certain dangerous pathways.
And as for the specific implications of “moral worth”, here are a few:
You take someone’s opinions more seriously
You treat them with more respect
When you disagree, you take time to outline why and take time to pre-emptively “check yourself”
When someone with higher moral worth is at risk you think this is a bigger problem, compared against the problem of a random person on earth being at risk
Thank you for the feed back! I am of course happy for people to copy over the essay
> Is this saying that human’s goals and options (including options that come to mind) change depending on the environment, so rational choice theory doesn’t apply?
More or less, yes, or at least that it becomes very hard to apply it in a way that isn’t either highly subjective or essentially post-hoc arguing about what you ought to have done (hidden information/hindsight being 20⁄20)
> This is currently all I have time for; however, my current understanding is that there is a common interpretation of Yudowsky’s writings/The sequences/LW/etc that leads to an over-reliance on formal systems that will invevitably fail people. I think you had this interpretation (do correct me if I’m wrong!), and this is your “attempt to renegotiate rationalism ”.
I’ve definitely met people who take the more humble/humility/heuristics driven approach which I outline in the essay and still call themselves rationalists. On the other hand, I have also seen a whole lot of people take it as some kind of mystic formula to organise their lives around. I guess my general argument is that rationalism should not be constructed on top of such a formal basis (cf. the section about heuristics not theories in the essay) and then “watered down” to reintroduce ideas of humility or nuance or path-dependence. And in part 2 I argue that the core principles of rationalism as I see them (without the “watering down” of time and life experience) make it easy to fall down certain dangerous pathways.
And as for the specific implications of “moral worth”, here are a few:
You take someone’s opinions more seriously
You treat them with more respect
When you disagree, you take time to outline why and take time to pre-emptively “check yourself”
When someone with higher moral worth is at risk you think this is a bigger problem, compared against the problem of a random person on earth being at risk