politics is an applied topic in rationality, as is economics and maximizing your return on (selfish or altruistic) investment, both also topics of this post. As long as a the discussion doesn’t degenerate into a blue vs. green fight, I see no problem with it. Does anybody else?
I don’t think it’s wise to censor a post from LW just because it contains some politics. However, I’m not sure I see any content in this post related to rationality.
To me, the post is basically saying “Someone wrote a book. Here’s a summary of what they wrote.” My response: Okay, so what?
That said, I did find this post useful in my “rationality-training”, because when I read it, my first instinct was to think “Aha, so I was right not to send my money to Africa”, but then recovered from this by noting that I was falling into Yvain’s trap of covering up the real reason I did not want to donate (i.e. that I am selfish).
politics is an applied topic in rationality, as is economics and maximizing your return on (selfish or altruistic) investment, both also topics of this post.
Every aspect of human activity is an applied topic in instrumental rationality. Unless the discussion is explicitly concerned with the feedback from the specific applications to the much more general techniques, it must be considered off-topic, otherwise the discussion will deteriorate into “general talk”, even if of highly rational variety.
politics is an applied topic in rationality, as is economics and maximizing your return on (selfish or altruistic) investment, both also topics of this post. As long as a the discussion doesn’t degenerate into a blue vs. green fight, I see no problem with it. Does anybody else?
I don’t think it’s wise to censor a post from LW just because it contains some politics. However, I’m not sure I see any content in this post related to rationality.
To me, the post is basically saying “Someone wrote a book. Here’s a summary of what they wrote.” My response: Okay, so what?
That said, I did find this post useful in my “rationality-training”, because when I read it, my first instinct was to think “Aha, so I was right not to send my money to Africa”, but then recovered from this by noting that I was falling into Yvain’s trap of covering up the real reason I did not want to donate (i.e. that I am selfish).
Every aspect of human activity is an applied topic in instrumental rationality. Unless the discussion is explicitly concerned with the feedback from the specific applications to the much more general techniques, it must be considered off-topic, otherwise the discussion will deteriorate into “general talk”, even if of highly rational variety.