[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

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Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. It is the first post in the series; the introductory post was here, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.

Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally "interested and successful at achieving" all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?

You say "all else equal" here. But all else clearly isn't equal - they have different genders.

All else being equal, yes I'd expect deadlift weight to be somewhat correlated with rationality.

0wedrifid13y

No. It is incredibly weak evidence that Bob is more rational than Alice.

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