Mercurial comments on People who "don't rationalize"? [Help Rationality Group figure it out] - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Mercurial 02 March 2012 11:38PM

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Comment author: Mercurial 03 March 2012 06:56:27AM 1 point [-]

Good points.

I'm not trying to sneak in connotations, by the way. We're just talking about the fact that these people seem to be quite good at things like goal-factoring, VOI calculations, etc.

Comment author: steven0461 03 March 2012 11:15:51PM 2 points [-]

I didn't mean to say the sneaking was intentional. VOI calculations seem like they would correlate more with intelligence than rationality as such. I can't find any reference to goal-factoring; what do you mean by that?

Comment author: malcolmocean 17 March 2013 10:40:57AM 0 points [-]

I know this is much later, but for future readers I thought I'd chime in that goal-factoring is a process of breaking your goals down into subgoals and so on. At each level, you ask yourself "what am I trying to achieve with this?" and then ask yourself if there might be a better/cheaper/more efficient way to do so.

This is very closely related to the idea of purchasing goods separately.

[I attended January 2013 CFAR workshop and volunteered at the March one.]