How exactly does knowingly being irrational actually help you to build a space shuttle?
If being rational requires behaviors and choices incompatible with constructing the space shuttle, irrationality is the only way to reach the goal of building it.
You can see this all the time in politics. If logical arguments help support the goals that people are trying to forward, they’ll use them. If logic works against them, they will ignore it—and try their hardest to distract everyone else from it.
Tell us: what was the rational purpose of the space shuttle in the first place?
“Truth” and “rationality” only work as top-level goals
Bottom-level. The bottom goal is the support for everything else. You can take off the top without disturbing anything beneath it, but changing anything lower-down affects everything above it.
‘Rationality’ isn’t a fundamental goal. It’s a means toward an end. The end, the only one that actually matters. Moving up through the goaltree, rationality only then becomes the goal we strive for.
In most cases, people only want as little truth as is necessary to accomplish their goals. Their actual goals, not what they claim to want or even what they think they want.
Eliezer will probably just pretend that all of those things [cryo etc.] are justified without ever suggesting that it could even be otherwise. Alternate strategies involve claiming that anyone who doesn’t accept that believing those things is justified is irrational, putting forward logically invalid arguments that ‘prove’ belief in those things is justified, and trying to claim their validity as axiomatic.
[EY: I’ve compacted five Caledonian comments into one comment. See OB policy on commenting frequency. I’m letting C get away with his sixth comment below, but if he keeps it up I’ll start deleting outright. If you want to post more, C, then wait.]
Ah, I see posts are now being edited without being marked to show that they have changed. Splendid!
If being rational requires behaviors and choices incompatible with constructing the space shuttle, irrationality is the only way to reach the goal of building it.
You can see this all the time in politics. If logical arguments help support the goals that people are trying to forward, they’ll use them. If logic works against them, they will ignore it—and try their hardest to distract everyone else from it.
Tell us: what was the rational purpose of the space shuttle in the first place?
Bottom-level. The bottom goal is the support for everything else. You can take off the top without disturbing anything beneath it, but changing anything lower-down affects everything above it.
‘Rationality’ isn’t a fundamental goal. It’s a means toward an end. The end, the only one that actually matters. Moving up through the goaltree, rationality only then becomes the goal we strive for.
In most cases, people only want as little truth as is necessary to accomplish their goals. Their actual goals, not what they claim to want or even what they think they want.
Eliezer will probably just pretend that all of those things [cryo etc.] are justified without ever suggesting that it could even be otherwise. Alternate strategies involve claiming that anyone who doesn’t accept that believing those things is justified is irrational, putting forward logically invalid arguments that ‘prove’ belief in those things is justified, and trying to claim their validity as axiomatic.
[EY: I’ve compacted five Caledonian comments into one comment. See OB policy on commenting frequency. I’m letting C get away with his sixth comment below, but if he keeps it up I’ll start deleting outright. If you want to post more, C, then wait.]
Ah, I see posts are now being edited without being marked to show that they have changed. Splendid!