TB: Rationality — Moral Duty to Be More Rational

We have a moral duty to become more rational — not merely an instrumental reason. Clear thinking is an obligation to others, not just a personal advantage. Spreading clarity and sound reasoning is part of what it means to be a responsible person in the world.

Irrational beliefs cause harm that propagates. A person who reasons poorly makes bad decisions that affect others, models bad reasoning for people who observe them, and is more easily manipulated into contributing to bad collective outcomes. The moral case for rationality is that your epistemic conduct is not a private matter: it shapes the epistemic environment everyone else has to live in.

• Reliability beats fancy skills — the foundation of any useful contribution is dependability. You cannot build anything on unreliable components. Rationality is what makes you reliable.
• Key virtues: honesty and integrity — these are the virtues that make rationality socially operational. You can reason correctly in private; integrity is reasoning correctly in public.
• Compounding returns on rationality — small improvements in how you think compound over years. The gap between a slightly more rational person and a slightly less rational person widens dramatically over a lifetime.
• Path to dependability — dependability is built through consistent rationality applied to commitments and predictions. Say what you'll do; do what you say; update visibly when you're wrong.
• Learn from others' mistakes — the mark of a rational person is extracting lessons from data they didn't personally suffer to produce.
• Exploit strong moral intuitions in decision-making — strong moral intuitions carry evidential weight even when they resist articulation. Rationality is not the suppression of moral intuitions but their proper integration.
• Rationality is central to the meaning of life — being part of something larger than yourself requires that you can contribute reliably. That requires reason.

• Don't Lie — intellectual honesty is a prerequisite for rationality
• Map and Territory — Yudkowsky's account of rationality as systematic correction of cognitive distortion

Rationality - Moral Duty to be more rational