My day to day life is populated with many who do not understand the lessons in this section. Interaction with these people is paramount in achieving my own goals; I am facing a situation in which the rational choice is to communicate irrationally. In specific, my colleagues and other associates seem to prefer “applause lights” and statements which offer no information. Therefore, attaining my personal, rationally selected goals might mean claiming irrational beliefs. I don’t think this is an explicit paradox, but it is an interesting point. There is a middle ground between “other-optimizing” (pointing out these applause lights as what they are) and changing my actual beliefs to those communicated by “applause lights”, but I do not believe it is tenable, and it may represent a conflict of goals (personal success in my field vs. spreading rational thought). Perhaps it is a microcosm of the precarious balance between self-optimization and world-optimization.
My day to day life is populated with many who do not understand the lessons in this section. Interaction with these people is paramount in achieving my own goals; I am facing a situation in which the rational choice is to communicate irrationally. In specific, my colleagues and other associates seem to prefer “applause lights” and statements which offer no information. Therefore, attaining my personal, rationally selected goals might mean claiming irrational beliefs. I don’t think this is an explicit paradox, but it is an interesting point. There is a middle ground between “other-optimizing” (pointing out these applause lights as what they are) and changing my actual beliefs to those communicated by “applause lights”, but I do not believe it is tenable, and it may represent a conflict of goals (personal success in my field vs. spreading rational thought). Perhaps it is a microcosm of the precarious balance between self-optimization and world-optimization.