#Rational Behavior

[omegaphilosophia]

The Ethics of Rationality

The ethics of rationality explores the moral dimensions of reasoning—how we ought to think, why we are obligated to be rational, and what responsibilities come with our reasoning abilities. It bridges epistemology, moral philosophy, and cognitive science by asking not just what is rational, but what is right about being rational.

1. Is Rationality a Moral Obligation?

One central question is whether individuals have a duty to be rational:

Epistemic responsibility suggests that we are morally accountable for our beliefs, especially when those beliefs affect others.

Believing things without evidence, or engaging in self-deception, can be viewed not just as cognitive failures, but as ethical wrongs—especially in areas like science, politics, and public discourse.

2. Rationality and Integrity

To act rationally often means to act consistently with one's beliefs, values, and reasons. This consistency is tied to:

Moral integrity: Acting out of principle and not merely impulse.

Autonomy: Respecting oneself as a reasoning agent. Failing to be rational can thus be seen as a betrayal of one’s moral character—like abandoning truth for convenience.

3. Rationality and Others

The ethics of rationality is not just personal—it’s relational:

Deliberative ethics: In discourse or argument, we owe others clear reasoning and intellectual honesty.

Cognitive empathy: Understanding others’ perspectives fairly is a rational and ethical act. This is why fallacies, propaganda, and manipulation are not just illogical—they're unethical because they degrade trust and shared understanding.

4. Instrumental vs. Moral Rationality

Instrumental rationality: Reasoning efficiently toward goals (e.g., maximizing profit or survival).

Moral rationality: Asking whether the goals themselves are justifiable. Someone may be "perfectly rational" in a narrow, utilitarian sense but still act immorally if their aims are unjust. Ethical rationality calls for reflecting on our ends, not just our means.

5. Bias, Ignorance, and Willful Irrationality

Modern ethics must deal with cognitive biases and motivated reasoning—tendencies to think in self-serving or tribal ways. The ethics of rationality thus includes:

Critical thinking education: A moral good in society.

Intellectual humility: Recognizing limits in our knowledge.

Moral courage: Willingness to question one's own deeply held beliefs.

Summary

The ethics of rationality challenges us to treat thinking itself as a moral act. It asks:

Are we reasoning in good faith?

Are we being intellectually honest?

Are we using our minds to uphold truth, justice, and shared understanding?

Being rational is not just about making "smart" choices—it’s about honoring the deeper responsibility of being a moral agent in a complex world.

[teacup-captor]

Ehehehahahhhjsjsjfjjdnfndkfndnd

[pocketgalaxies]

cannot imagine being caleb widogast btw and having such a fixed view of yourself as this irredeemable monstrous man who wishes for nothing more than to atone for the unatonable while also questioning whether you even deserve to live long enough to do so and then befriending this girl who is notorious for never sparing anyone's feelings when she has something to say and has, since you've known her, intentionally rebuilt herself from the ground up into someone who is real and direct and honest even when it hurts, and for her to lean forward and look into your eyes and say, with a magnitude of brutal honesty that only she could muster, that it Wasn't Your Fault.

[sunlit-mess]

[its-kinda-snowy]

Set in silence we begin Companions in an empty room I taste their victory and sin

[mxtxfanatic]

I would like the bingqiu fans and haters, alike, in the svsss to understand what is and is not rape. Rape is when you are forced into a sexual encounter you do not want and did not consent to. Rape is not when you consented to sex and didn’t enjoy yourself. The sex could be bad, awkward, or maybe even traumatic, but if it was consented to by all parties involved and no one revoked that consent? Not rape.

Shen Qingqiu is not a rape victim of Luo Binghe. If anything, he is a victim of sexual coercion by the system, and if we are to count this (which we should), then Luo Binghe, too, is a victim (possibly the victim as he was never given a choice in the Maigu Ridge scene). Shen Qingqiu consents to all sexual encounters he has with his Luo Binghe (not counting Maigu Ridge given the coercion + I do not count it as a sex scene) while rejecting even the possibility of a sexual encounter with literally anyone else, even Bingge. And he consents because it is the Luo Binghe that he knows and loves that he is having sex with. Which is, you know, the whole point of this being a romance.

[merisms]

In 2025 can we put away the reassurances of "it wasn't your fault" "they just didn't deserve you" etc line of thinking when it comes to mental health and interpersonal relationships.

Sometimes it is your fault. Sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. Nobody deserves anybody and people leaving you doesn't mean they are bad people. You are not deeper than your actions because nobody is experiencing who you are "deep down," they are experiencing how you act toward them. You do not "deserve" forgiveness--change because you want to improve, changing does not mean you will be forgiven by the person you harmed and that needs to be something you sit with. If you don't like how you were, how you acted, then change it. Don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself and trying to reassure yourself that you are a perpetually misunderstood victim. Get up.

[mirror-and-mind]

This is such a weird thing to do. Why is he importing love potions from as far away from Japan as possible? The shipping costs must be insane. Does Britain really have love potions that are so superior to any that can be acquired from somewhere closer? Is Britain even a love potion-manufacturing country? What the hell's in them?

[serialport0]

The concept of antisocial behavior is strange. Are you telling me that you're spending the energy you have now in ways that destroy your opportunities to give or receive energy in the future? This seems like a losing strategy.

If you're so smart, why aren't you prosocial? Why haven't you realized that connection is the best part of life? And missing out on it is like missing the whole vibe.

[to-the-batcomputer]

considering the idea of dick subconsciously thinking "when WE were kids" about him and bruce

[shallowseeker]

“but shal, how could crowley have slept with naomi when fergus macleod wasn’t alive yet????”

well. for starters, “mesopotamia” could’ve just been a general poetic.

but also could be as simple as… he didn’t.

he has intel on her. and he’s posturing, as usual. because that’s what crowley does.

double entendres and innuendos are his weapons of choice to sow distrust, suspicion, discomfort, derision. to put you off balance, if he can. (and if that fails, he’ll switch to insults or, at worst, incessant goading.)

And the thing is… almost ALL his posturing is sexual. it’s how he wields power (from what traditionally tends to be from a weaker position)

it’s more about how he operates and fergus’s victimhood/ historical demon trauma more than it is a statement of de facto truth

he wants you to read into it

get distracted; get discomfited

just long enough to take your eye off the ball or give him the upper hand in a power struggle

[katherinakaina]

I also need to add a bit of context to your very short bit about Zizians, @strange-aeons .

TLDR: Ziz left the rationalist community 6 years ago and even at the time she wasn’t liked there, the fact she managed to exploit. Her actions directly contradict both hpmor and what CFAR was doing and teaching. Her other affiliations that are no less relevant include being an anarchist and a vegan. You are not immune to cults just because you are not into any particular weird internet subculture.

Cults form from niche subcultures, that’s true enough. But any subculture can form a cult because any culture, even the mainstream one, contains some ideas that can be twisted to an insane degree. And any ideology, even the most niche and scary one, can be approached casually and sceptically. What is actually needed to create a cult is not a special ideology but a cult leader and vulnerable people to follow them. That is the main uniting quality between all cults. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with a certain music band or a certain fantasy book forum is an exercise in motivated reasoning. You will always end up finding something that's wrong.

The rationalist community was trying to prevent the formation of a cult as best as they could. Partly that’s the reason why people like Ziz and others with bad and unpopular takes were often tolerated longer than necessary. To encourage criticism and prevent getting stuck in a positive feedback loop. Because it’s not a high control group! You cannot be simultaneously mad that people are allowed to talk about wacky ideas on forums and also that the group is supposedly very rigid and controlled. Apparently, they could use some control. Not like it would actually stop an aspiring cult leader from recruiting, they’d just go some other place.

Zizians were not mostly trans by accident (what are the chances?). Ziz was recruiting the most vulnerable people who related to her and were willing to trust her (also because there’s a lot of trans women in the community, like a lot). She used their very real and grounded experience of discrimination to convince them that her not being liked is not due to her takes being bad but because she’s trans.

And she had a lot of takes, some of them not being popular enough you actually complained about. You criticised LessWrong for being too pro-capitalist for your taste and then started talking about the Really Bad rationalists and THEY ARE LEFTISTS killing landlords and cops.

Now if we are talking about ideologies that devalue human life, how about some that require actual Class War (guess what people do in wars) or violent mass uprisings? Or some that require assassinations of certain select individuals? How come you hear that there are people on forums discussing the ethics of murdering those directly responsible for destroying our planet and you, as a leftist, do not immediately recognize yourself in it? Nothing discussed on LessWrong is more violent than a communist revolution or even the killing of Brian Thompson.

Why being into rationality at some point and reading hpmor is the only thing you told about Ziz? I think I know why. All the right wingers really leaned into the whole ‘trans vegan cult’ thing. That is not a good look for our side, is it? How amazing would it be to find a scapegoat. Who cares about those AI safety freaks anyway? They are all cishet men anyway! All cishet men who somehow have an offshoot of violent vegan queers, that certainly adds up.

Ziz being a radical vegan* (another niche subculture) corresponds to her actions way better than anything that's discussed on LessWrong or happened in hpmor. In fact, there’s an exact scene you probably skipped. Harry is on a very important and dangerous mission with Quirrell and at some point he is told to hide while Quirrell duels a cop guard at magical Guantanamo Bay – a total pig and an absolute scum who Ziz would kill without a second thought. Harry does share her sentiment, he fucking hates Azkaban. But when Quirrell tries to kill the evil torture cop Harry instinctively protects him jeopardizing the entire mission. And it’s not a random scene. It starts the entire disillusionment spiral where Harry realizes his beloved groomer professor might be a bad guy. Murder of a bystander whose only crime is being a product of his society is not something Harry can tolerate. He does end up decapitating a bunch of actual death eaters in the very end (the bit you probably did read) to save his own life and defeat Voldemort and even then he regrets it and apologizes for it (despite it being the right thing to do and not even comparable to a random cop). There’s an entire scene where Harry bonds with Draco over their mother’s deaths where he expresses that every death is a tragedy, even deaths of very bad people (like Voldemort).

Not to mention the entire immortalism theme (did you skip the entire third book?). One cannot read hpmor and walk away thinking human life is worthless or only super geniuses deserve to live. Timeless decision theory leading to murdering people is not in there**, nothing in the fic even suggests such a conclusion. More about how you got most things wrong about hpmor here.

Let’s face it, those were a bunch of sleep deprived vulnerable people high on all sorts of radical ideas, who were kicked out of every decent movement and that’s why they slipped into a cult.

Any subculture can become a cult. If you ever read a boring preachy fanfic or ever went to a physical meeting with internet weirdos. If you ever felt rejected by mainstream society and went looking for ‘like-minded people’, for a ‘found family’, for a ‘place where you belong’. You are not safe. Touching grass from time to time is not enough. You have to never leave the pastures to be highly immune to cults. And that ain’t you, my friend. That’s none of us.

Previous post about rationalist community.

* Ever heard ‘veganism is the moral baseline’ (sometimes minimum or imperative)? That’s not a slander, it’s a commonplace argument and an actual slogan.

** The only use of timeless decision theory in hpmor is about being able to reliably cooperate with other well meaning people, not about killing anyone.

[semisolidmind]

Do Dogday and Catnap ever have those moments where they slowly but surely begin to bond with each other in your AU?

no.

i honestly don’t think the two could ever really get along again after all that’s happened between them.

in the survivor au, dogday won’t forgive catnap for killing all his friends and his zealous worship of the prototype (and in the saved au, he's not about to forgive the one who tore his lower half from him). the feline betrayed his friends, the only ones who really understood what it meant to be like him.

not to mention all the times catnap tried and failed to kill dogday. the only reason he survived was because he managed to be quick enough with a metal beam or a broken pipe when catnap tried to ambush him. the two have spent years fighting.

and to top it all off, dogday will never trust catnap around y/n. it doesn't matter that he has no reason to hurt them anymore, dogday wouldn't put it past catnap to try and get some sort of petty revenge on him by killing his favorite person (it doesn't matter that catnap seems to be worshipping them now). he can barely tolerate catnap living on the same property as him, let alone how that monster vies for y/n's attention.

the dog will never let his gaurd down around catnap again, especially not when y/n is around.

his angel may be willing to try to forgive, but dogday is not. the moment he can find an excuse, dogday will beat catnap to a pulp.

[backpackingspace]

More of penelope and odysseus being rat bastards in love please. I know for a fact that these two were menaces to any neighboring kingdoms. They were pulling scams, they committed crimes, I know these two are just the most obnoxious people at a party.

[resinfossil]

So I recently started reading the Murderbot Diaries and after finishing System Collapse I am now convinced that the average corporate wouldn't recognize a rogue SecUnit if it skipped up to them in full armor, called them a stupid motherfucker, and backflipped into the nearest uncrewed, passengerless cargo transport

[dannyphantom-fenton]

I see a lot of crossovers that talk about people misunderstanding Vlad and Danny, but what about some fics where the town notices?

After Vlad becomes mayor he’s being watched more and people start noticing his unhealthy obsession with Danny Fenton. They notice how uncomfortable Danny is, how creepy Vlad is, and come to their own conclusions.

It’s even better/worse if Maddie gets tipped off about it, and she is about to brush it off when she realizes her son has been going out at odd times, having new injuries and there is always something off about his conversations with Vlad.

It’s even better if she knows about Vlad’s crush on her and hears him comment about how much Danny is like her.

This doesn’t even need to include Ellie at all yo be sus. All it needs is some unfamiliar eyes watching this grown man act creepy around a child and anyone could come to the (wrong) conclusion.