I don't think there's a single defining point of difference, but I tend to think of it as the difference between the traditional social standard of having beliefs you can defend and the stricter individual standard of trying to believe as accurately as possible.
The How to Have a Rational Discussion flowchart is a great example of the former: the question addressed there is whether you are playing by the rules of the game. If you are playing by the rules and can defend your beliefs, great, you're OK! This is how we are built to reason.
X-rationality emphasizes having accurate beliefs over having defensible beliefs. If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety. Instead of asking "does this evidence allow me to keep my belief or oblige me to give it up?", it asks "what is the correct level of confidence for me to have in this idea given this new evidence?"
Eliezer uses "Traditional Rationality" to mean something like "Rationality, as practised by scientists everywhere, especially the ones who read Feynman and Popper". It refers to the rules that scientists follow.
A surely incomplete list of deficiencies:
In some ways, Eliezer is too hard on Traditional Rationalists (TRists). In the "wild and reckless youth" essay, which you cite, he focuses on how TR didn't keep him from privileging a hypothesis and wasting years of his life on it.
But TR, as represented by people like Sagan and Feynman, does enjoin you to believe things only on the basis of good evidence. Eliezer makes it sound like you can believe whatever crazy hypothesis you want, as long as it's naturalistic and in-principle-falsifiable, and as long as you don't expect others to be convinced until you deliver good evidence. But there are plenty of TRists who would say that you ought not to be convinced yourself until your evidence is strong.
However, Eliezer still makes a very good point. This injunction doesn't get you very far if you don't know the right way to evaluate evidence as "strong", or if you don't have a systematic method for synthesizing all the different evidences to arrive at your conclusion. This is where TR falls down. It gives you an injunction, but it leaves too much of the details of how to fulfill the injunction up to gut instinct. So, Eliezer will be contributing something very va...
I just started listening to THIS (perhaps 15min of it on my drive to work this morning), and EY has already mentioned a little about traditional rationality vs. where he is now with respect to reading Feynman. I'm not sure if he'll talk more about this, but Luke's page does have as a bullet point of the things covered:
Eliezer’s journey from ‘traditional rationality’ to ‘technical rationality’
so perhaps he'll continue in detail about this. Off hand, all I can specifically remember is that at one point he encountered some who thought that multiple routes...
One relevant attempt at a definition:
I will be using "extreme rationality" or "x-rationality" in the sense of "techniques and theories from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, or similar deliberate formal rationality study programs, above and beyond the standard level of rationality possessed by an intelligent science-literate person without formal rationalist training."
In one essay, Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with winning. In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes). Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).
All of those are problems with traditional rationality, and Elizeer has critiques traditional rationality for all of them. Traditional rationality should have helped Elizeer more than i...
You can read "human condition" as a poetic remark, but choosing a phrase such as that to open a scientific paper is imprecise and vague and that they chose this phrase reveals something of the authors' bias I think.
No, Tversky and Kahneman have not specifically said here whether the heuristics in question are genetic or not. Don't you think that's odd? They're just saying we do reasoning using heuristics, but not explaining anything. Yet explanations are important; from these everything else follows.
That they think the heuristics are genetic is an inference and googling around I see that researchers in this field talk about "evolved mental behaviour" so I think the inference is correct. It means that some ideas we hold can't be changed, only worked around, and that these ideas are part of us even though we did not voluntarily take them onboard. So we involuntarily hold unchangeable ideas that we may or may not agree with and that may be false. It's leading towards the idea we are not autonomous agents in the world, not fully human. The idea that we are universal knowledge creators means that all our our ideas can be changed and improved on. If there are flaws in our ideas, we discard them once the flaws are discovered.
With regard to induction, epistemology tells us that it is impossible, therefore no creature can use it. Yes, I disagree with the experimental evidence on philosophical grounds; the philosophy is saying the evidence is wrong, that the researchers made mistakes. curi has given some theories about the mistakes the researchers made, so it does indeed seem as though the evidence is wrong.
I have no problem with the idea that probabilities help solve problems. Probabilities arise as predictions of theories, so are important. But probability has nothing to do with the uncertainty of theories, which can't be quantified, and no role in epistemology whatsoever. It's taking an objective physical concept and applying it in a domain it doesn't belong. I could go on, but you mention LSD, so I presume you know some of these ideas right? Have you read Conjectures and Refutations or Deutsch?
In several places in the sequences, Eliezer writes condescendingly about "Traditional Rationality". The impression given is that Traditional Rationality was OK in its day, but that today we have better varieties of rationality available.
That is fine, except that it is unclear to me just what the traditional kind of rationality included, and it is also unclear just what it failed to include. In one essay, Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with winning. In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes). Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).
In this essay, Eliezer laments that being a traditional rationalist was not enough to keep him from devising a Mysterious Answer to a mysterious question. That puzzles me because I would have thought that traditional ideas from Peirce, Popper, and Korzybski would have been sufficient to avoid that error. So apparently I fail to understand either what a Mysterious Answer is or just how weak the traditional form of rationality actually is.
Can anyone help to clarify this? By "Traditional Rationality", does Eliezer mean to designate a particular collection of ideas, or does he use it more loosely to indicate any thinking that is not quite up to his level?