Yes, I’m a karmawhore too :-)
cabalamat
Why should rationalists necessarily care a lot about other people?
They shouldn’t, particularly. End goals are not a part of rationality, rationality exists to achieve them.
However, many end goals can be more easily achieved by getting help from others. If your end goals are like this, it’s rational for you to solve group coordination problems and care about other people.
If groups magnify the effectiveness of rational thinking, what would an entire community or nation of rationalists be like? And how could such an outcome be achieved?
Theism is the first, and oldest problem. We have freed ourselves from it, yes, but that does not mean we have solved it. There are still churches.
Indeed. When a community contains more than a critical number of theists, their irrational decision making can harm themselves and the whole community. By deconverting theists, we help them and everyone else.
I’d like to see a discussion on the best ways to deconvert theists.
I suspect that for large numbers of politicians—probably the maqjority—the question of whether a proposition is true doesn’t really interest them all that much. They are more interested in whether a proposition will win or lose them votes. If they think it’ll lose votes, they won’t agree with it, and most lack the intellectual curiousity to care whether it is true.
You’re right. Religion really is distilled, purified essence of bullshit.
At least for now, most people are not atheists/rationalists. Atheism may seem to be a crazy behaviour to a lot of people! So maybe one can signal commitment by publically associating oneself with an atheist/rationalist organisation.
Terrorism is partly about socialising, but I don’t think that can be the whole story, for two reasons:
If terrorism is just about socialising why don’t they just go down the pub or whatever—it’s far less likely to get you killed or banged up.
Socialising is a human universal, so what makes different societies have different amounts of terrorism?
Is this belief falsifiable? If not, is it meaningful?
I susepct a mild varient of the AAH is probably true. There is a problem that needs solving: why can humans swim (and many do so for fun), while other hominoids avoid water?
I doubt if there was a ever a time in prehistory where the ancestors of humans were all living an aquatic lifestyle, but there must have been many occasions where a band of pre-humans lived on the shores of a lake or ocean. Some of these individuals would have used the water to find food or escape from predators, and I hypothesize that this happened often enough that evolution would have changed our psychology and anatomy accordingly.
the most important application of improving rationality is … but ordinary politics
True because good policies can have vastly differnet outcomes than bad policies.
there are plenty of things government can do better than the market
And plenty of things the market can do better than the government.
I don’t regard the UK Labour Party as being permissive on social issues—for example they recently criminalised BDSM porn, and plan to introduce ID cards and monitor everyone’s Internet activity.