Upon thinking about that second definition of rational neutrality, I find myself thinking that that can't be right. It's identical to calibration. And even a rational-neutral agent that's been "repaired" by applying the best possible probability estimate adjustment function will still return the same ordinal probabilities: Barney the Biased, even after adjustment, will return higher probabilities for statements he is biased toward than statements he is biased against.
I would have said this:
So, here's another definition of rational neutrality I came up with by writing this: you are rational-neutral if, given only your source code and your probability estimates, it's impossible for someone to come up with better probability estimates.
...but that definition doesn't rule out the possibility that an agent would look at your probability estimates, figure out what the problem is, and come up with a better solution on its own. In the extreme case, no agent would be considered rational-neutral unless it had a full knowledge of all mathematical results. That's not what I want; therefore, I stick by my original definition.
I have a problem: I'm not sure what this community is about.
To illustrate, recently I've been experimenting with a number of tricks to overcome my akrasia. This morning, a succession of thoughts struck me:
Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that we have a two-fold definition of rationality:
If this community was only about epistemic rationality, there would be no problem. Akrasia isn't related to epistemic rationality, and neither are most self-help tricks. Case closed.
However, by including instrumental rationality, we have expanded the sphere of potential topics to cover practically anything. Productivity tips, seduction techniques, the best ways for grooming your physical appearance, the most effective ways to relax (and by extension, listing the best movies / books / video games of all time), how you can most effectively combine different rebate coupons and where you can get them from... all of those can be useful in achieving your values.
Expanding our focus isn't necessarily a bad thing, by itself. It will allow us to attract a wider audience, and some of the people who then get drawn here might afterwards also become interested in e-rationality. And many of us would probably find the new kinds of discussions useful in their personal lives. The problem, of course, is that epistemic rationality is a relatively narrow subset of instrumental rationality - if we allow all instrumental rationality topics, we'll be drowned in them, and might soon lose our original focus entirely.
There are several different approaches as far as I can see (as well as others I can't see):
I honestly don't know which approach would be the best. Do any of you?