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Rational Decision-Making

Expanding on #2112…

If an idea, as written, has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it (ie, criticisms) have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.

If an idea, as written, does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?

It's a fair point. I agree it's not a perfect word. I tried many labels and variations, but I ended up with Drives because in my view it contrasted well with Intuition:

Unlike Intuitions, Drives carry the sense of a deep urge whose underlying theory is largely unconscious. You’re aware of the feelings they produce as you say, but not of the reasoning behind them. For example, you might know you’re sexually attracted to someone or suddenly feel sad, yet have no idea why — then that’s a Drive.

If you do have some sense of why you’re feeling a certain way and can roughly express it in words, it’s an Intuition. If you can fully articulate it in words, it’s a Statement. Statements can also produce feelings. For example, if one of your core values is non‑coercion, you might feel angry when someone disciplines their child in an immoral way — here, the Statement (often paired with Intuitions or Drives) is producing the feeling of anger.

I agree the main shortcoming of Drive is that it’s often taken to mean innate or hardwired knowledge. I haven’t found a better alternative, so I make it clear when explaining the concept that Drives can also arise from habitualized knowledge. Deutsch (in this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e2LWxaqQUQ) seems to also support this way of defining new terminology

If you want to say something new the terminology you use is going to be unsuited for it because the terminology is going to be adapted to previous ways of thinking um what you can do is just invent your own terminology that's a terrible idea because no one will understand what you're saying and secondly it is subject to the same problem that it will only represent accurately fairly accurately your thoughts at a particular time when you're addressing a new criticism it will no longer be suitable so I think what people usually do and what is done in physics and what's done in philosophy what Popper did is to use the nearest existing term and be very careful to explain that one means something new by it.

If you have alternate suggestions, I'm of course eager to hear them!

If I get her right, one could in principle hold a rational belief which is false —a belief in god, say— so long as this belief stems from a sincere effort to explain the world and so long as the believer is ready to jettison his belief if he were to think of some reason why it cannot be true.

A belief in god is a form of mysticism. Rand writes that rationality “means the rejection of any form of mysticism […].” So a belief in god is not just false, it’s irrational. It’s also implausible that someone could hold on to as blatantly false an idea as the existence of god without some refusal to look into the matter critically.

If non-existence is to mean anything at all, I think that’s it, yes.

I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.

Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.

Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.

Clearly, an embryo without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.

According to https://www.neurosciencefoundation.org/post/brain-development-in-fetus, “an embryo’s brain and nervous system begin to develop at around the 6-week mark.” And: “At as early as 8 weeks (about 2 months), you can see physical evidence of the brain working (the electric impulses) as ultrasounds show the embryo moving.”

This idea is for viable pregnancies only. Other considerations may apply for non-viable ones.

Anything that processes information is a computer.

The brain processes information.

Therefore, the brain is a computer.

That is not what freedom means.

Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.

Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.

If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is forced.

Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.

The anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.