Re:As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity ha...
by jart on Saturday June 12, 2021 @11:38PM
(#27489545)
I'm familiar with the rationalist movement and all the rationalists I've met have been wonderful people with few exceptions. I hadn't heard of epistemic rationality, but I find it interesting how the LessWrong definition (top search result) makes it sound like self-criticism and atonement.
Re:As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity ha...
by skissane on Sunday June 13, 2021 @12:52AM
(#27489844)
One concern I have is how closely many people associate "rationality" with the "rationalist movement" (LessWrong, etc). Rationality has been discussed by philosophers for well over 2000 years. Aristotle famously declared that rationality was the feature that distinguished human beings from lesser animals. Most of those philosophers had radically different views from those of the contemporary "rationalist movement". Even today, many thinkers who radically disagree with the "rationalist movement" still believe in the importance of rationality, they just disagree with the "rationalist movement" on what actually counts as "rational".
Re:As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity ha...
by jart on Sunday June 13, 2021 @02:25AM
(#27490269)
Well now they get to be a footnote in Plato's Republic. I'm not concerned about what people believe. If they want to get excited about Bayes theorem then that's great. I'm not concerned if people disagree on what it's called or how it's defined. Do you think the people who get paid to be rational understand rationality? I've seen things like software that earned billions in additional revenue get rolled back because we couldn't explain how it made decisions. The answer is that I don't have the answers and no one else does too. What's remarkable is how philosophers like Charles Babbage helped us make thousands of years of philosophy executable and we've unleashed it unto the world. How do we begin to understand that let alone explain it to the world?
In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).
Some people think epistemic rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality, but the philosopher Thomas Kelly wrote what is (to me at least) a pretty convincing refutation of that viewpoint: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/epistemicasinstrume...