[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.

"Trying to synthesize a personal art of rationality, using the science of rationality, may prove awkward: One imagines trying to invent a martial art using an abstract theory of physics, game theory, and human anatomy. [...] Therefore we must connect theory to practice."

This is a key realization that strikes me now. Merely reading the sequences or LW posts and absorbing the wisdom of others is insufficient. Replacing old cached knowledge with new doesn't enable a person to advance their art.

To get the most out of a desire to change one's thinking, one has to actively put the theorems to use. The body of accumulated knowledge has to be tested and extended. Feynman's shock at the fragile knowledge of others "learned by rote" appears to me to be similar to Yudkowsky's observation here.

I find this to be the difficult part of re-reading the Sequences. The first time through is full of hard revelations and new ideas. Many of these become adopted, but not fully understood. Successive readings are opportunities to slowly break things down and build a functioning understanding of the principles, but you also have to go out and actually apply the knowledge to internalize it. (I have been passive in that regard and it bothers me.)

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