Short version: What do you want? That is your reason to be rational.
I can think of many reasons, but mostly it seems to come down to this: rationality confers power. Bertrand Russell called Western thought “power thought,” which seems pretty accurate.
That seems accurate to you, because power is what you want. You have said this explicitly yourself: “Well I just want to rule the world.” Because power is what you want, you assume that it is what everyone else wants. So when you read that rationality “wins”, you interpret winning as “defeating other people”. That is only “winning”, in the sense of the slogan “rationality wins”, if what you want is to subjugate or exterminate “the competition”. You see everyone as “the competition”, and your solution is to take over the world. Bertrand Russell gives you delightful cold prickles (I’m sure you have no use for warm fuzzies) because you hear in him something you want to hear: everyone is everyone’s enemy. (BTW, here’s some context for that phrase of his. Plato’s totalitarian dream, 1931 edition.)
So it seems to me that the lasting appeal of irrationality, spirituality, religion, etc. is that, for some strange reason, people aren’t quite comfortable worshipping this Terminator-like god of reason.
You are the would-be Terminator God, the self-styled AlphaOmega.
How’s that going? What do you do when you’re not reading LessWrong and being pissed on? Not that LW karma means anything in the greater scheme of things, but you keep coming back for more. It is said that he who would be Pope must think of nothing else. How much more so for he who would rule the world!
Yes.
Short version: What do you want? That is your reason to be rational.
That seems accurate to you, because power is what you want. You have said this explicitly yourself: “Well I just want to rule the world.” Because power is what you want, you assume that it is what everyone else wants. So when you read that rationality “wins”, you interpret winning as “defeating other people”. That is only “winning”, in the sense of the slogan “rationality wins”, if what you want is to subjugate or exterminate “the competition”. You see everyone as “the competition”, and your solution is to take over the world. Bertrand Russell gives you delightful cold prickles (I’m sure you have no use for warm fuzzies) because you hear in him something you want to hear: everyone is everyone’s enemy. (BTW, here’s some context for that phrase of his. Plato’s totalitarian dream, 1931 edition.)
You are the would-be Terminator God, the self-styled AlphaOmega.
How’s that going? What do you do when you’re not reading LessWrong and being pissed on? Not that LW karma means anything in the greater scheme of things, but you keep coming back for more. It is said that he who would be Pope must think of nothing else. How much more so for he who would rule the world!