Not just instrumental goals. If you believe that you should achieve something, it doesn't automatically mean that you really should. Your belief is a fact about your brain, which is not always in good alignment with your values (even though it really tries).
When you notice that you want something (as a terminal goal), you are reflecting on the fact that your brain, probably the best value-estimating apparatus you've got, has calculated that pursuing this goal is good. It could be wrong, it's your job now to figure out if it made an error in that judgment. Maybe you can find a way to improve on its reasoning process, compensating for a specific flaw and thus gaining access to a superior conclusion produced by the improved procedure (which is often ultimately the point of knowing how things work). (Or maybe you'll even find an argument that makes taking into account what your own brain tells you in a given instance a bad idea.)
Your belief is a fact about your brain, which is not always in good alignment with your values (even though it really tries).
But where do values reside? How do you know that your belief did not correspond to your values?
Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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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.
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