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by anon-3988 8 days ago
> Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.

So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion.

If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas.

If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion.

All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut.

I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.

3 comments

> So they are not rationalist then?

one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.

> This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion

This is not true of rationalists! "Straw Vulcan" as a failure mode was talked about fifteen years ago - https://www.lesswrong.com/w/straw-vulcan

It’s because of cowardice. Discussing emotions entails being exposed to some degree, but this strain of so called rationality seems rather to be about distancing oneself from the subject in question, which tends to make people feel and behave like arbiters. One could argue that the poets are the real rationalists, at least the good ones. Because there’s no distancing from the truth, just raw and pure content, which is radically different than second order, cheap, hopelessly biased analysis.