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TimS comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Comments (1430)
What do you mean? Whose irrationality? Isn't it more straightforward (it's there among the 'virtues of rationality' no?) to just not call things 'rational' if they do not involve thinking?
If there is no alternative, there doesn't seem to be a possibility of improvement. If improvement is impossible, what exactly are we worrying about?
It's useful to know some things that are unchangeable.
I think it would indicate that not every action is being thought over. That some things a person does which lead to the achievement of a goal may not have beent planned for or acknowledged. By calling all things that are usefull in this way 'rational' I think you'd be confusing the term. Making it into a generic substitute for 'good' or 'decent'. To me, that seems harmfull to an agenda of improving people's rational thinking.
.>, for there is no alternative available.
I would like to propose the alternatives of 'beneficial' and 'usefull'. Otherwise we could consider 'involvement in causality' or something like that.
I think the word rationality could use protection against too much emotional attachment to it. It should retain a specific meaning instead of becoming 'everything that's usefull'.
I'm not in love with using the word "rationality" for what this community means by rationality. But (1) I can't come up with a better word, (2) there's no point in fighting to the death for a definition, and (3) thanks to the strength of various cognitive biases, it's quite hard to figure out how to be rational and worth the effort to try.
I think various forms of "optimization" would probably fit the bill. That is, pretty much everything this site endorses about "rationalists" it would also endorse about "efficient optimizers."
But the costs associated with such a terminology shift don't seem remotely worth the payoff.
Sure, but asking the rational decision to make when there is literally no decision to make is not a well formed question.
You use an invalid argument to argue for a correct conclusion. It doesn't generally follow that something that can't be improved is not worth "worrying about", at least in the sense of being a useful piece of knowledge to pay attention to.
It's a definitional dispute, mostly caused by my original failure to specific that I meant mental processes in this comment.
It's all irrelevant to my point, which is a self-contained criticism of a particular argument you've made in this comment and doesn't depend on the purpose of that argument.
(Your quoting someone else's writing without clarification, in a reply to my comment, is unnecessarily confusing...)