= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
AnnaSalamon comments on Branches of rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (64)
Maybe?
While it's true that epistemic rationality, and accurate ideas are useful for everything, it's also true that really wanting something (having Something to protect, if you like) can give a huge boost to one's willingness to face unpleasant facts, and to one's epistemic rationality more generally.
Yup. I wasn't very clear (and I might be projecting my own particular mind here) but I feel like knowing about something to protect, knowing that really wanting something will boost your willingness to face facts, will let you make decisions to so as to produce more situations where you're willing to face facts.
Hmm. I'm not explaining this very well. Okay. What we want is "doing things right". You could say, roughly, that epistemic rationality (what LW has focused on) is about "things right", and instrumental rationality (what your post after numbers 1 2 and 3 seems to be focused on) is "doing things". I was sort of saying "Look, LessWrong's done a good job on epistemic rationality, lets get the same thing happening for instrumental rationality" and that your post is a great launching pad.
5 and 6 are straight-forwardly about forming accurate beliefs. Much of 4 is also part of epistemic rationality, insofar as epistemic rationality is furthered by finding the few questions that can really improve one's total picture of the world, and e.g. understanding evolution, or what the multiverse is like, instead of learning more random details about fruit flies.