AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

**tl;dr** There is no ultimate goal. That may seem to imply nihilism, but it doesn't. This is fine, but in novel situations, I don't know what to do, because I don't know which goal to choose, because there is no ultimate goal.

One observation: Robin Hanson is one of the founding intellects behind LessWrong and a frequent collaborator with Rationalist types, and he's cited several times here. But, he also wrote a book (with Kevin Simler) about how we are constantly lying to ourselves about our motivations.

It's somewhat unfair, but I think of Rationalists almost definitionally as those who are in deep denial of nebulosity
postrationalism seems to be an effort to re-introduce some nebulosity onto what is still a fundamentally rationalist framework.
. They aren't idiots about objectivity, the way the Ayn Rand cultists are, but they still think in terms of an objective reality and models that are more or less accurate – that's what LessWrong means. And look, above I was doing the same thing until I caught myself, so it's not like I'm immune.

A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation is a LessWrong post that looks like it gives a detailed argument, backed up with scientific literature, on why an optimizing or neuroeconomic viewpoint is correct:

But now, neuroscientists are directly measuring the neurons whose firing rates encode value and produce our choices. We know a lot more about the neuroscience of human motivation than you might think. Now we can peer directly into the black box of human motivation, and begin (dimly) to read our own source code

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LessWrong

25 Sep 2022 - 25 Sep 2022

The origin site of Berkeley Rationalism, still going strong but the movement is much bigger than the site now.

This site got its start because I wanted to drop some commentary on LWMap/A Map That Reflects the Territory, a set of books that spun out of the LessWrong community.