[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

Unnamed

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.

I could quibble with "successful at", but I think the analogy still holds in any case. Virtually everyone is interested in defending themselves, at least, from physical threat.

Martial arts are one approach to being more effective at defense, and rationality is a similar approach to being more effective at reaching goals in general.

We should absolutely be quibbling about "successful." Someone comes to me with advice for achieving my goals: "I know just the ticket, all you have to do is swallow this giant pack of lies." Well, couldn't they be right?

I think it's a rare individual who would actually be in less physical danger if they were better at martial arts. The scope of rationality is similarly limited -- it's not useful for every one, or for every goal.

9

[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

9

9

9

[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

9

9