Nornagest comments on Branches of rationality - Less Wrong

75 Post author: AnnaSalamon 12 January 2011 03:24AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 12 January 2011 01:16:10AM *  7 points [-]

In addition to what you've covered here, I think there's a substantial and largely unexplored set of techniques necessary for groups to act rationally. #6 on your list, efficiently accessing others' knowledge, is one aspect of this; Eliezer's "Craft and the Community" sequence also establishes a goal and some good examples of what not to do. Aside from that, though, we don't seem to have collected much instrumental knowledge in that domain.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 12 January 2011 02:13:40PM *  7 points [-]

I actually had "Forming effective teams" on my original list, but then erased it and several others to avoid muddying the discussion with borderline cases of “rationality”. But collecting best practices for teamwork would be extremely cool.

Some other items from my original brainstorm list:

  1. Good brain and body health. Exercise, sufficient sleep, social connectedness, regular concrete accomplishments, and anything else that helps keep the brain in its zone of intended functioning. Maintaining high energy levels and a habit of rapidly implementing new ideas and gathering data, so as to avoid building up excuse mechanisms around tasks or inferences that require effort.

  2. Analogy and pattern-recognition. Much of your inferential power comes from automatic processes of pattern recognition. One could learn to train this process on good examples (that will help it correctly predict the problems you’re actually facing), and to notice what sort of an impression you have in a given instance, and, from track records and/or priors, how likely that impression is to be correct.

  3. Skills learning. Become skilled at learning non-verbal or implicit “doing” competencies, and at trading information back and forth between verbal and non-verbal systems. Example competencies include emotional self-regulation, posture and movement, driving, social perception and interaction, drawing, and martial arts.

Comment author: Davorak 12 January 2011 08:07:40PM 0 points [-]

Editing is a nontrivial skill and I think you used it well to cut the above topics, since team building and the above three topics seem like consequences of the 8 listed branches.

Team building is a critical skill for making multigenerational changes outside of the hard sciences. For this reason I think it deserves special attention even if its importance can be drawn from your 8 branches and humanities current evolutionary state.

Comment author: komponisto 12 January 2011 06:34:48AM 4 points [-]

Related is another branch that has received relatively little attention (due to a sort of taboo, possibly not unjustified): how to spread one's beliefs (and/or goals) to other people.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 12 January 2011 03:32:25AM *  3 points [-]

A good point. I wonder who does have that knowledge?

Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 12 January 2011 02:24:42PM *  4 points [-]

A good point. I wonder who does have that knowledge?

John Boyd's concept of OODA loop seems to be relevant here:

The OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act) is a concept originally applied to the combat operations process, often at the strategic level in both the military operations. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The concept was developed by military strategist and USAF Colonel John Boyd.

OODA stands for:

  • Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses
  • Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one's current mental perspective
  • Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one's current mental perspective
  • Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

To put this into rationality-language:

  • Look at the territory;
  • Draw a correct map of the territory based on what you saw;
  • Plan the route through the map to where you want to be;
  • Hit the road.

The concept itself, as described on Wikipedia, doesn't mention groups per se, but Boyd's work on OODA seems to include specific thoughts on groups. Here's a related quote from Wikipedia:

[Boyd] stated that most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective-driven orders, or directive control, rather than method-driven orders in order to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual commanders at each level.

Comment author: Clarity 30 July 2015 12:41:25AM 0 points [-]

Thanks, rationality skill discovered!

Comment author: Nornagest 12 January 2011 04:04:50AM 0 points [-]

Good question. I think the first place I'd look is business, followed by the military (probably at more the strategic than the tactical level). There's probably also some institutional wisdom floating around in academia, although I'm not sure what fields I'd look at first; most of the research I've personally been involved in didn't involve much distribution of decision-making between team members and thus was something of a degenerate case.

Comment author: Drahflow 12 January 2011 11:02:48AM *  2 points [-]

A short list for prediction making of groups (and via extension decision making):

Comment author: lukeprog 12 January 2011 05:26:30AM 2 points [-]

Somewhat related to this is the relatively recent field of social epistemology. Just a heads-up.

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