AnnaSalamon comments on Branches of rationality - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: AnnaSalamon 13 January 2011 11:46:20AM 4 points [-]

I think there are many important unsolved problems in the theoretical/philosophical parts of rationality, and this post seems to under-emphasize them.

What would a picture of rationality’s goal that correctly emphasized them look like?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 13 January 2011 07:15:55PM 3 points [-]

I think it should at least mention prominently that there is a field that might be called "theory of rationality" and perhaps subdivided into "theory of ideal agents" and "theory of flawed agents", and we still know very little about these subjects (the latter even less than the former), and as a result we have little theoretical guidance for the practical work.

I'm tempted to further say that work on theory should take precedence over work on practice at this point, but that's probably just my personal bias speaking. In any case people will mostly work on what they intuitively think is interesting or important, so I just want to make sure that people who are interested in "rationality" know that there are lots of theoretical problems that they might consider interesting or important.