pjeby comments on Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality - Less Wrong

77 Post author: AnnaSalamon 17 September 2010 07:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (121)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: pjeby 21 September 2010 11:53:52PM 1 point [-]

Saying 'optimists' indicates that optimism is a near-constantly activated trait, which does sound like it would harm epistemic rationality. Perhaps realists could do as well as or better than optimists if they learned to emulate optimists only when actually doing things like golfing or acting,

I rather doubt that, since one of the big differences between the optimists and pessimists is the motivation to practice and improve, which needs to be active a lot more of the time than just while "doing something".

If the choice is between, say, reading LessWrong and doing something difficult, my guess is the optimist will be more likely to work on the difficult thing, while the purely epistemic rationalist will get busy finding a way to justify reading LessWrong as being on task. ;-)

Don't get me wrong, I never said I liked this characteristic of evolved brains. But it's better not to fool ourselves about whether it's better not to fool ourselves. ;-)