[extropy-chat] Mature rationality

[Chris Hibbert]

Eliezer wrote:

> Anyone who wishes to make a serious commitment to rationality, to 
> learn it as an art the way that judo or fencing is an art, must
> commit to being rational all the time, every time, twenty four hours
> a day seven days a week, with not a single area of life reserved for
> relaxing with some comfortable nonsense, not one place left where
> that darned inconvenient rationality business can't stomp all over
> the things you want to believe.

This seems like hyperbole to me.  Perhaps it is intended as hyperbole. 
Certainly in the rest of his post, Eliezer focused on your beliefs on 
which you take action.  But here, he seems to be saying that there is no 
rationale for times when you are doing things other than thinking about 
and acting on the truth.

The part that seems hyperbolic is that this eschews time for relaxation, 
time for fiction, time for art.  One of the ways that I entertain myself 
is reading science fiction and occasionally fantasy.  I can't defend 
them as a search for what's real, or an exploration of deeper truths. 
Occasionally that's what I find, but the goal is time off from the hard 
work that Eliezer advocates we spend all our (waking) time on.

I think he's overstating the case, and the time away from what's real 
seemed to be at least part of what Mike Lorrey was pointing at.

> Mike Lorrey wrote:
>> There are plenty of people who are completely rational in their
>> daily lives, yet are religious about that which is unexplained and 
>> unexplainable. That you never were able to make the leap to that
>> level of mature spirituality is not the problem of those who were
>> able to do so.

I am not an advocate of "mature spirituality", but if Mike means this 
practice is a species of relaxation, or "renewing one's energy", then I 
don't seem the harm as long as it doesn't effect the practitioners' 
actions or expectations about how the world works.  But when it bleeds 
over into a belief that when an egg and a sperm touch each other 
something magic happens, that's stepping over the line.

Chris
-- 
It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so
easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium.
-- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy.

Chris Hibbert
hibbert at mydruthers.com
http://mydruthers.com