If you have the capacity for it, you should be less moral. Not more immoral, not more self-interested, but less confined by fixed ideas of goodness.
Essay from resonates with my writing on ethics, although in somewhat different conceptual framework.
breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-
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Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology.
“Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
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Strong analogy: both ethics and technical rationality fail in the face of nebulosity.
In both cases, one should *not* revert to immorality or irrationality.
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Here describes a phenomenon I’ve increasingly observed recently. People I respect, who like my work and to whom I seem to be a mostly-good person, are disappointed, and also baffled, because I am not on their side in the culture war. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-
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I appear “weirdly confused, weak-willed, morally compromised, and inconsistent” and maybe it seems my politics are incoherent or ignorant or bland middle-of-the-road normie. I have, actually, strong political views, but they are not mappable if you seek moral “dry ground.”
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When rationality fails in the face of nebulosity, it’s tempting to say “oh, then we need the other thing, which is emotions and spirituality and intuition and stuff.”
Usually wrong.
Reverting to emotionalism and tribalism when ethics fails—usually wrong. metarationality.com/cognitive-scie
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. and I are often cited as “postrationalists.” True inasmuch as we were rationalists at one time (PhDs in control theory & AI respectively) and no longer are.
I don’t use the word, because “postrationalism” often means “emotions, yay!”
Not my thing.
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Replying to @LisaIRMcNulty and @St_Rev
Yes, I think that's right!
I do somewhat feel some vague responsibility for explaining how "meta-rationalism" differs from (some) understandings of "postrationalism." But I feel responsible for explaining way more different things than I ever can, so I probably won't!
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Replying to
I don't know if that's actually the same sense of the word... postrationalist seems to point specifically to pointing to being post-lesswrong-rationalism.
The generic sort of rationality assumed/demonstrated by earning a STEM PhD is at once tighter and looser.
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I'd say academic-STEM rationality is actually closer to the reasonable nebulous normie standard than LW-style. Parts of my PhD thesis are technical and formal (much more so than typical LW-rationalist discourses), but other parts are basically hand-waving narrative shitposting

