Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
By your reasoning, shooting your enemy in the head rather than arguing against him is the most rational thing you can do.
"Rationality is about winning" is affected by the question of "rationality towards doing what?" Rationality towards beating your enemies is won by having enemies who are beaten, but rationality about making correct arguments is only won by having correct arguments.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have other enemies though, and signalling to them that you will shoot them might inspire them to gang up against you and shoot you first.
Most people reading this post will have some value functions that are not actually that different from each other, which are meant to optimise for general day-to-day flourishing of themselves and some limited set of other people they care about, and then perhaps to a lesser extent some aesthetic and moral preferences about the larger society they find themselves in. What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin, contra the "rationalists proven not so rational after all!" rhetoric that has been surrounding its propagation.
What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin
Only if their value function is not about making correct arguments and believing accurate things.
Of course, this then becomes a motte and bailey, where the motte is "it's rational because it wins according to a value function that doesn't value truth" and the bailey is "it's rational in the way that 'rational' is ordinarily used in this context".
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Notes -
Bounded rationality is a real field of study, describing optimal behaviour for agents who can't actually reason and obtain information infinitely for free.
Even Yudkowsky concedes that rationality is about winning. It seems pretty straightforward to see that someone who is still busy calculating probabilities to see if some skub paper checks out while the police remove him from the premises as the debt collector wants to foreclose his home is not winning. As a corollary, if the gut feeling strategy consistently gets better outcomes than the "reason and logic" one, it's more rational.
By your reasoning, shooting your enemy in the head rather than arguing against him is the most rational thing you can do.
"Rationality is about winning" is affected by the question of "rationality towards doing what?" Rationality towards beating your enemies is won by having enemies who are beaten, but rationality about making correct arguments is only won by having correct arguments.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have other enemies though, and signalling to them that you will shoot them might inspire them to gang up against you and shoot you first.
Most people reading this post will have some value functions that are not actually that different from each other, which are meant to optimise for general day-to-day flourishing of themselves and some limited set of other people they care about, and then perhaps to a lesser extent some aesthetic and moral preferences about the larger society they find themselves in. What I was aiming to demonstrate is that those people can quite rationally - towards their own value function - decide to dismiss this essay and not shift their opinion on Ivermectin, contra the "rationalists proven not so rational after all!" rhetoric that has been surrounding its propagation.
Only if their value function is not about making correct arguments and believing accurate things.
Of course, this then becomes a motte and bailey, where the motte is "it's rational because it wins according to a value function that doesn't value truth" and the bailey is "it's rational in the way that 'rational' is ordinarily used in this context".
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