AlexU 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: Demosthenes 31 March 2009 04:24:21PM 1 point [-]

This debate has already played out in attacking and defending Pragmatism.

A lot of the rubrics by which to judge whether or not rationalism wins or whether or not rationalism is an end in itself involve assigning meaning and value on a very abstract level. Eliezer's posts outline a reductionist, materialist standpoint with some strong beliefs about following the links of causality. Rationalism follows, but rationalism isn't going to prove itself true.

Deciding that rationalism is the best answer for your axiomatic belief system requires taking a metaphysical stand; I think that if you are looking for a definite metaphysical reason that you should practice rationalism, then you are interested in something that the practice of rationalism is not going to help much.

Comment author: AlexU 01 April 2009 02:02:43AM *  1 point [-]

"Rationalism" as compared to what? Mysticism? Random decision-making? Of course rational behavior is going to be by far the best choice for achieving one's particular ends. I wasn't questioning the entire concept of rationalism, which clearly has been the driving force behind human progress for all of history. I was questioning how much making "tweaks" -- the kind discussed here and on OCB -- can do for us. Or have done for us. Put differently, is perseverating on rationality per se worth my time? Can anyone show that paying special attention to rationality has measurable results, controlling for IQ?

Comment author: Demosthenes 01 April 2009 11:28:09PM 4 points [-]

Mysticism and random decision making are both acceptable and highly successful methods of making decisions; most of human history has relied on those two... we still rely on them. If you are a consequentialist, you can ignore the process and just rate the outcome; who cares why nice hair is correlated with success -it just is! Why does democracy work?

What makes rationalism worth the time is probably your regard for the process itself or for its outcomes. If its the outcomes then you might want to consider other options; following your biases and desires almost blindly works out pretty well for most people.