thomblake comments on Deciding on our rationality focus - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 22 July 2009 06:27AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 22 July 2009 07:15:32AM *  2 points [-]

The concept "achieving your values" doesn't deserve the term "instrumental rationality". If it does, then, as you point out, works about instrumental rationality are merely works about how to do stuff. You're giving a fancy new name to an old concept.

ETA: Not that that's always exactly what we mean when we say "instrumental rationality", of course ...

How about the given definition of "epistemic rationality"? This is also really general: it's how to know stuff. Granted, that's precisely what being less wrong means, but we're not interested in general education. Granted again, the top-rated post of all time, "Generalizing From One Example", is definitely epistemic rationality but not obviously any other type of rationality.

So, here I propose some other definitions of "rationality":

Aumann rationality: a person is Aumann rational if they are rational (don't interpret this circularly!), they believe other people are Aumann rational, and other people believe they are Aumann rational. Perfect Aumann rationality causes people to never disagree with each other, but it's a spectrum. Eliezer Yudkowsky is relatively Aumann rational; people on Less Wrong are expected to be quite Aumann rational with each other; people in political debates have very little Aumann rationality.

Rational neutrality: though people who are rational-neutral discard evidence regarding statements, as any intelligent being must, their decision whether to discard a piece of evidence or not is not based on the direction/magnitude of it--if they ignore an observation, they do so without first seeing what it is.

Krasia: quite unrelated to any other type of rationality, people with high krasia are good at going from believing that an action would result in high expected utility to actually taking that action.

Comment author: thomblake 22 July 2009 02:03:51PM 0 points [-]

I'm going to start using "krasia". I hadn't encountered it before but apparently it's had some currency in epistemology.