Kaj_Sotala comments on The Benefits of Rationality? - Less Wrong

18 Post author: cousin_it 31 March 2009 11:17AM

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Comment author: AlexU 31 March 2009 03:10:32PM 6 points [-]

Yes. I've been a semi-regular reader of OCB for about a year. I think it's an interesting blog. But have I learned anything useful from it? Has it made any practical difference in the choices I make, either day-to-day or longterm? The answer is no. Admittedly, this may be my own fault. But I recall a post, not too long ago, soliciting people's feedback on "the most important thing you learned from OCB in the past year," or something of that sort. And while there were lots of people excitedly posting about how much OCB has taught them, the examples they gave were along the lines of "I learned the power of fundamental attribution error!" or "I learned the importance of continually adjusting my priors!" with curiously few examples of real differences OCB made in anyone's practical choices. This raises the question: if tweaking our rationality has no appreciable affect on anything, then how can we say we're really tweaking our rationality at all? Perhaps we're just swapping new explanations for fundamentally irrational processes that are far too buried and obscure to be accessible to us.

That said, I think things like the recent posts on akrasia are strong moves in the right direction. Intellectually interesting, but with easy to grasp real-world implications.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 31 March 2009 09:38:51PM 3 points [-]

The problem is that even though learning to identify and avoid certain biases will affect your behavior, there's no easy way to articulate those effects. It comes mainly from things not done, not things done.

For instance, upon hearing a fallacious argument, being aware of its fallacies causes the hearer not to believe in it, where he previously would have. Or if he thinks something on his own - previously a bias would have caused him to think a certain thought, which would have led to a certain action. Now, having learned to identify the bias, he doesn't even generate that thought, but instead another, which leads to him taking a different action. While these things do certainly have an effect, they're too subtle to identify. You're not going to know the thoughts you avoided (even if you can try to guess), only the ones you've actually thought.

I feel this has largely been the case for me. My behavior has certainly been affected because I now think more clearly. That, I'm pretty certain of. But can I give any concrete examples? I'm afraid not. The effect is on a too subtle of a level for me to properly observe. But that doesn't mean there aren't any concrete examples, it only means I can't verbalize them.