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RobinHanson comments on Beginning at the Beginning - Less Wrong
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In my recent blogging heads TV with Tyler Cowen we argued about the value of "having explicit and conscious standards of validity, and applying them in a systematic way." My intuition agrees with you, but can we point to anything more concrete than that? Do we have data suggesting this approach is in fact more accurate?
I wonder if that will be listed here someday:
http://bloggingheads.tv/search/?participant1=Hanson,%20Robin
"Do we have data suggesting this approach is in fact more accurate?"
That isn't the goal, here, although ultimately empiricism demonstrates that people concerned with explicit and conscious standards become more accurate. That's a side-effect, albeit a very nifty one.
The point is not to be correct, but to know that we're as correct as our understanding permits. If we don't understand our reasons for doing something, and we can't predict how well our choices will work out by looking at experience, we can't know whether we're doing the right thing.
If your decision systems are unconscious, but you can consciously look at their outcomes and see that they work out, going along with your feelings is rational - because you are consciously recognizing that they work and consciously choosing to follow them.
If your decision systems are unconscious, and your meta-decision systems are also unconscious, and you can't explain why you're following your feelings (beyond that you feel that you should), you're being irrational. Even if your systems and meta-systems are correct.
Thank you. I'd been struggling to clearly state this for some time now, with respect to the relationship between reason and virtue. If you take virtue theory at face value, it seems like the suggestion is to pursue virtue instead of rationality. Thinking of the meta-decisions as rational allows one to say that pursuing virtue is rational.