4 ms·

The captialists had a very rational (if self-interested) reason to dislike the luddites. They just viewed straw men as an effective tactic.

• wiz21c 8y ago
  >> rational when it's about people, "rational" is the last thing we need. Empathy, sympathy, compassion is what you need.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    Compassion and sympathy without reason just lead to activities that don't help those who are supposed to be helped, and may even harm them. Reason is not incompatible with compassion.
  • Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
    Why are those superior attributes to rationality?
    • anoncoward111 8y ago
      because "rationally" i should kill you and take your money and food but "empathetically" i don't want the same thing to happen to me, so i tolerate your existence in hopes that you tolerate mine
      • roenxi 8y ago
        There isn't a moment in recorded history where one human acting alone has outperformed a group of humans working in tandem. It just doesn't happen. You sometimes get scenarios where one human has disproportionate social control over a group, but even then experiments with democracy have shown it overwhelmingly outperforms the competition. So far on both an absolute and a per capita basis. Many (most?) of our morals also happen to be game-theory optimums that you would raitionally see value in even as a true sociopath. What you describe isn't rational, it is some combination of desperation and short term thinking. The rational approach has always been to organise and cooperate. If you actually tried to behave that way you would discover that what you call 'behaving rationally' will involve you having no material goods, comfort or prospect for obtaining them.
        • anoncoward111 8y ago
          ok, i have a better one: "rationally", i shouldn't care about global warming because it's inconvenient to alter my lifestyle and because global warming will not affect me as much in my lifetime but "empathetically" i care about the future environment i'm leaving for future humans
          • shakna 8y ago
            You're using 'rational' as something devoid from worldview - which it can't be. Rationally I should have multiple children, as my only legacy is my name. Still rational, differing worldview. Part of the worldview your thoughts on rationallity betray is that only the 'here and now' matter. Which only fits a very small philosophy even within the subset of humanity that have no belief in anything supernatural. A worldview guides not just our view on our relationship to others, and ourselves, and not just moral conduct, but the end goals being targeted. Our rationallity cannot be divorced from our motivations. Some worldviews are just 'to live another day', others are more nuanced, measuring impact against criteria. For example, frugality is a worldview, where you don't have any rational compulsion to kill, steal and hoarde, as you don't need it anyway.
            • projektir 8y ago
              > Rationally I should have multiple children, as my only legacy is my name. I would say that any view that includes a concept such as "legacy" is already highly irrational... there's nothing rational about having a world view that you do not call into doubt. At the end of the day, you'll just gravitate towards a worldview that's the easiest to support. That's what tends to happen to people since cognitive dissonance hurts. There's nothing rational whatsoever in this entire process and it is the very start of the problem, you can't ignore it. The whole problem with "rational" is that it's a poor term that got appropriated to describe behaviors that are not actually rational. "Rational" is mostly a shorthand for "logically derived", which is only one rather shallow facet of processing, and, not all that surprisingly, can lead to rather irrational behaviors, like the ones the person you're responding to is referencing. It often leads to nihilism, amoral philosophies, and other things that play right into the worst parts of game theory. Because this is what we naturally do if we turn off other processing. We have all the other processing for a reason. Emotions, intuition, and experience are all very important. Pure logic cannot replace them, it is simply too slow, and there's simply not enough information. The reason a lot of us are really annoyed with rationalists is because they're walking around saying all those things don't matter.
      • taneq 8y ago
        Rationally, you're better off helping (or at least not actively harming) your fellow humans as part of a social covenant where they also help (or at least not actively harm) you. Empathy is a mechanism for implementing morality, and all morality is enlightened self-interest.
      • sbuttgereit 8y ago
        No. What you describe as rational is, you might say, not well reasoned. If your reason only operates on the next several hours or days into the future, perhaps you have a point. I intend to live my entire life with as much happiness and joy as possible. Rationally, my thriving over years far outweighs any mere survival in a short-sighted sense. And importantly, your idea of what is rational doesn't lead there. It's simply foolish, momentary satiation. For anyone taking your proposed rational course, however, me and my more rationally self-interested cohorts will eventually get wind of that game (assuming they act "rationally" according to your proposition), we'll band together to defeat them: after all it's in our interest to do so. Not that we're somehow altruists, but that we're self-interested for the long term, over the course of our lives rather than the next meal. But even so, we don't need the threat of being pummeled by opponents to recognize the course of action you propose as "rational" is mere fools gold; we can see the benefits of the products of others as being far more enhancing than any one meal or some temporary bit of wealth. I gain tremendous benefit from the productivity of other people. Some of those people are artists, some are sanitation workers, some are engineers, and almost all I will have never known individually or even of their existence beyond the output of their minds and labor. It is in -my interest- that -they- thrive in a reasonable way, too. It's in my rational self-interest that they know they will reap the rewards of their efforts, rather than for me to simply steal it and undermine that trust. All of this I can derive from the rational pursuit of my own self-interest.
  • megaman22 8y ago
    Rational is exactly what is needed. People suck, and sympathy for their suckiness and failings is the last thing that will spur meaningful progress in the crusade to make people suck less. I wish I was kidding.
    • projektir 8y ago
      That's a really high horse you're sitting on.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Rationality is mostly orthogonal to empathy, sympathy and compassion. Think of it this way: empathy, sympathy, and compassion are inputs. Rationality is the reasoning process. If you're rational but don't have those three inputs, you'll end up as a highly-functional sociopath. If you do have those three inputs but don't think rationally, you'll make a lot of wrong decisions that hurt people you're trying to help.