Not sure how much this post has to do with the economic fact of scarcity. Seems like it would be very easy to mistake actual rationality based on economic knowledge for this bias.
syzygy
Karma: 40
It seems to me that in at least some of these examples you are confusing the map with the territory. Take genetics:
Genes don’t proliferate by being good for the species; they win by being good for themselves.
Failing to be “good for the species” is not a fact about evolution, or genes. Thinking that evolution was supposed to be “good for the species” was just a heuristic humans used when trying to understand evolution. The “selfish gene” does not say anything meaningful about the phenomenon of evolution, it just shows that we have refined our understanding of evolution.
Now take politics:
Why do governments inevitably end up run by career lawyers and politicians instead of scientists and economists?
What does the phenomenon of government actually look like, in reality? Well, it looks like a system of human hierarchical organization in which career lawyers and politicians have a natural propensity to be on top. Thinking that the phenomenon of government has anything to do with understanding nuanced social issues is confusing the map with the territory.
To my mind, the people asking the question frequently neglect the second-order effects of regularly talking about politics on the sort of people who will join LW and what their primary goals are.
Could you clarify this point a little? I though the primary goals of LW include refining and promoting human rationality, and I see no reason why this goal would not apply to politics. Especially since irrational political theories can have a directly negative effect on the quality of life for many people.
I have seen this problem afflict other intellectually-driven communities, and believe me, it is a very hard problem to shake. Be grateful we aren’t getting media attention. The adage, “All press is good press”, has definitely been proven wrong.
Hello, I am Nicholas, an undergraduate studying music at Portland State University. Even though my (at least academic) primary area of study is the arts, the philosophy of rationality and science has always been a large part of my intellectual pursuits. I found this site about a year ago and read many articles, but I recently decided to try to participate. Even before I was a rationalist, my education was entirely self-driven by a desire to seek the truth, even when the truth conflicted with what was widely believed by those around me (teachers, parents, etc.) My idea of what “the truth” means has changed significantly over time, especially after learning about rationality theory, Baye’s theorem, and many of the concepts on this site, but the core emotional drive for knowledge has never wavered.
I have read Politics is the Mind Killer and understand the desire to avoid political discussions, but I feel that my conception of a “good” political discussion is significantly different than most users of this site. I care nothing for US style partisan politics. Far from exclusively arguing for “my home team”, my political ideas have changed dramatically over the years, and are always based on actual existing phenomenon rather than words like “socialism”, “capitalism, “republican” or “democrat”. I would be interested to know what led to this ban on political thought. Is it a widely held view of the community that political discussion is inherently devoid of rationality, or was it a decision made out of historical necessity, perhaps because of an observed trend of the quality of political discussions? In either case, I would like to gain a better understanding of the arguments and attempt to refute them.
What effect could misplacing the electrodes have besides stimulating a different part of the brain? I’m honestly asking, I have no idea about any of this.
Am I correct in (roughly) summarizing your conclusion in the following quote?
Yes, there really is morality, and we can locate it in reality — either as a set of facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, or as a set of facts about what an ideally rational and perfectly informed agent would prefer, or as some other set of natural facts.
If so, what is the logical difference between your theory and moral relativism? What if a person’s set of natural facts for morality is “those acts which the culture I was born into deem to be moral”?
I view intellectual property as the logical conclusion of the “unhealthiness” Eliezer is describing. I laugh when I look at all the ridiculous patents and copyrights that exist, but then I get scared when I remember that someone can use legal force against me for discovering those ideas simply because they discovered them first.
You mean “libertarian” in the literal sense right? You’re not implying that the subject of “free will” has anything to do with politics are you?
Isn’t this true about any conceivable hypothesis?