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For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
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.
You are not the first one to point this out, rationalism is a terrible name for the movement. Mostly because rationalism already exists as a philosophical system, partially defined as opposition to empiricism. This form of rationalism is the belief, that the basis of all eternal truth comes from reason alone. Hence Descartes argument of cogito ergo sum which comes from total critique of validity of senses. Which is exactly the opposite to what Yud/Alexander "rationalists" espouse. Rationalists are really empiricists in this way.
First, this is silly. Rationalists were not the first ones to invent logic, this is too broad a definition. On practical level famoust rationalists are obsessed with movements like Effective Altruism, which is rabidly utilitarian. Scott Alexander described himself as consequentialist utilitarian. Alexander described also Robin Hanson as total utilitaian. Yudkowsky is not very clear writer on this, he often espouses consequentialist and utilitarian thinking, but he complicates stuff. I find this short tweet as a very good summary:
So 2 and a half or two and three quarters for three are team utilitarianism. So I do not think I misjudged that.
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A bit of a tangent, but I can't really read existential comics anymore after seeing his twitter.
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