Hello, my name is Luke. I’m an urban planning graduate student at Cleveland State University, having completed an undergrad in philosophy at the University of New Hampshire a year ago. It was the coursework I did at that school which lead me to be interested in the nebulous and translucent topic of rationality, and I’m happy to see so many people involved and interested in the same conversations I’d spend hours having with classmates. Heck, the very question I was asking myself in something of an ontological sense—am I missing the trees for the forest—is what led me here, specifically to Eliezer’s article on the fallacies of compression, which was somewhat helpful. Suffice to say, I tend to think I’m not missing the trees for the forest, and that in fact the original form of the idiom remains true for most other people, though thankfully, not many here.
I’m deeply interested in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and metaethics, all of which I attempt to approach in systemic ways. As for what led me to consider myself a rationalist in these endeavors...I’m not sure I do. In fact, I’m not sure anyone can or should think of themselves a rationalist, considering that basic beliefs, other than solipsism, are inductive and inferential, and thus fallible. We could argue in circles forever (as others have) what constitutes knowledge, but any definition seems, in my view, to be arbitrary and thus non-universal and therefore, again, fallible—even mathematical knowledge and formal logic.
Granted, I don’t sit in a corner rocking back and forth sucking my thumb, driven mad by the uncertainty of it all, but I also operate with the knowledge that whatever I deem rational behavior and thought processes only seem rational because I’ve pre-decided what constitutes rational behavior (i.e., circularity, or coherentism at best...feeling like I’m writing a duplicate of a different post). Of course, all that seems like too easy an exit from a number of hard problems, so I keep reading to make sure that, in fact, I oughtn’t be rocking back and forth in a corner sucking my thumb for the utility of it, turning into a kind of utility monster. An absurdist I remain, but one with a pretty strong intuitive consequentialist metaethical framework which allows me to find great joy in the topics covered on LW.
Hello, my name is Luke. I’m an urban planning graduate student at Cleveland State University, having completed an undergrad in philosophy at the University of New Hampshire a year ago. It was the coursework I did at that school which lead me to be interested in the nebulous and translucent topic of rationality, and I’m happy to see so many people involved and interested in the same conversations I’d spend hours having with classmates. Heck, the very question I was asking myself in something of an ontological sense—am I missing the trees for the forest—is what led me here, specifically to Eliezer’s article on the fallacies of compression, which was somewhat helpful. Suffice to say, I tend to think I’m not missing the trees for the forest, and that in fact the original form of the idiom remains true for most other people, though thankfully, not many here.
I’m deeply interested in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and metaethics, all of which I attempt to approach in systemic ways. As for what led me to consider myself a rationalist in these endeavors...I’m not sure I do. In fact, I’m not sure anyone can or should think of themselves a rationalist, considering that basic beliefs, other than solipsism, are inductive and inferential, and thus fallible. We could argue in circles forever (as others have) what constitutes knowledge, but any definition seems, in my view, to be arbitrary and thus non-universal and therefore, again, fallible—even mathematical knowledge and formal logic.
Granted, I don’t sit in a corner rocking back and forth sucking my thumb, driven mad by the uncertainty of it all, but I also operate with the knowledge that whatever I deem rational behavior and thought processes only seem rational because I’ve pre-decided what constitutes rational behavior (i.e., circularity, or coherentism at best...feeling like I’m writing a duplicate of a different post). Of course, all that seems like too easy an exit from a number of hard problems, so I keep reading to make sure that, in fact, I oughtn’t be rocking back and forth in a corner sucking my thumb for the utility of it, turning into a kind of utility monster. An absurdist I remain, but one with a pretty strong intuitive consequentialist metaethical framework which allows me to find great joy in the topics covered on LW.