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I may be missing some information about "rationalists" or some history about the discussion of rationalists on the motte. But I am confused by the idea that moral commitments and rationalist commitments would be opposed.
Do rationalists believe that there are moral commitments that are more rational than others? My assumption would be that rationalists would consider moral commitments to be axioms and therefore a requirement to even discuss morality, and that to be morally rational would be to derive positions from your moral axioms in a consistent way. For example, as described by Rawls when he discuses "reflective equilibrium" - the psychological state of having all of your moral axioms be aligned consistently such that you are generally protected against cognitive dissonance because in an argument people cannot show that your moral axioms contradict each other.
I assume some level of moral relativism to be associated with rationalism, and that that is generally not an issue only because most rationalists share moral axioms - they basically share enlightenment morals. But surely you could be rational and have radically different axioms.
To be rational is to rationally extend ones moral principles rationally. Why would it be irrational to behave in line with ones moral principles?
Rationalists subscribe to utilitarianism, which in and of itself is incoherent moral philosophy. It has two main problems:
Inability to define utils. Utils are mired with inconsistencies, it is hard to put against each other suffering vs pleasure. Many rationalists evade this as principle of minimizing suffering, but even then there is a problem of comparison: is sand grain in an eye of 1,000 people worse than broken arm of one person?
Time inconsistency of utils. Actions that decrease utils today may increase them tomorrow. Existential comics has a good example for trolley problem in that vein.
The word "rationally" does a lot of heavy lifting here, as it assumes utilitarianism. Let's say I subscribe to virtue ethics, which says that I cannot commit murder. But then a rationalist comes and says "hey, if you kill Hitler in his crib, you will prevent countless murders in the future". Wrong, this is not going rationally about my moral assumptions, it is assuming completely different moral system.
A bit of a tangent, but I can't really read existential comics anymore after seeing his twitter.
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Just speaking for myself, I’m in favor of real politik. The most important axioms: ought implies can, and policies exist to serve the nation.
The first is pretty simple. If you’re not in a position to honor the treaty without serious damage to yourself, then don’t do it. If the enemy is stronger than you are, the only thing you get for entering a war is the death of your own people. You aren’t even going to really stand up for the treaty, and will prove to everyone else that you can’t.
The second is just a principle for political survival. If you’re constantly getting involved in conflicts because of morals you’re wasting the resources of your country and getting little for it. Your military doesn’t get stronger because of your morals. People can’t eat morals. And wars by nature have a real cost that will be carried by your nation. As such, I think it’s rather important to have a good strategic reason for a war. It could be materials access, or the ability to project power, it could be to shore up an important ally, or access to markets, but it has to be a reason that you can articulate and that serves the good of the nation you’re leading.
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I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality
I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.
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If we're talking about LessWrong Rationalists, then the whole idea behind learning to be rational is that "Rationalists Should Win."
They should achieve their instrumental goals at minimal cost and end up with more utility points than when they started.
But having rigid 'moral principles' implies there are personal rules that you simply will not break. And if another rational actor knows you have rules you won't break, they can exploit those rules to reliably defeat you in any given contest. Here "defeat" just means "increase their own utility even at the expense of your utility."
One particularly silly example is if you had the moral rule "Never physically hurt women." Then your opponent could just pay a woman to come around and beat you up and take your stuff whenever they wanted, knowing you probably won't fight back.
If you have certain rules governing your behavior that you NEVER will alter, you're precommitting to certain actions that can lead to you 'losing,' which means you're making a 'precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances' and thus not being fully 'rational' since, as above, "Rationalists should win."
You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.
When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)
Oh is this going to be one of those arguments.
Yeah, now its just a question of how recursive you want to get. Defecting makes sense in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma when you have no way of judging that the other party might be willing to cooperate. Iterated games, if they're of indefinite length present different strategic options.
I wasn't even agreeing with the premise of "moral principles force you to act in an irrational way." Just pointing out the potential contradiction if you want to 'win' you might have to bend or break certain moral principles, which was the gist of the original question.
Indeed, I think the whole point of invoking morals as principles rather than as 'mere' variables in a utility function, some principles exist because they DO create better outcomes in a systemic way, even if it leads to 'losing' a few local contests. As you say, 'being the sort of person' who does the Good thing even at personal cost will probably create many more utils over the long run.
But there are indeed some moral principles which can be systemically exploited and if your principles cause you to repeatedly lose, you're not being 'rational' on your own terms.
But then we're back to the question: what do you value and is it easier to maximize your utility by following certain moral guiding principles even when it leads to 'losing' a few isolated games, or by being completely unprincipled other than trying to maximize your own utility in every single game you encounter and adapt your strategy accordingly.
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That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
Ah, but that's only if you're actually in an iterated game.
Some people might correctly model an interaction as a one-shot game with a new stranger every single time, with no mutual knowledge or expectations established beforehand. In that case, hitting 'defect' will let you win in cases where the other side magnanimously chooses cooperate.
If you go into an interaction knowing you're pitted against person who will choose 'cooperate' on principle, and you don't expect to have repeated interactions with that person, you can 'win' by defecting because you 'know' you're escaping scott-free in that case.
Indeed, I don't know of any prisoner's dilemma tournaments where the 'cooperate every time' strategy wins.
With all that said, I'm agreeing that if you take it up one level, being the 'sort of person' who cooperates when faced with such a dilemma creates a much better world, and thus will likely create more utility for you, and for all other players, which can certainly compound over time.
So adopting the moral principle that loses you individual games can still make you the overall winner.
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