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TimS comments on Rationally Irrational - Less Wrong
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Comments (414)
Why call this losing instead of winning-by-choosing-your-battles? I don't think members of this community would endorse always telling others "I know a better way to do that" whenever one thinks this is true. At the very least, always saying that risks being wrong because (1) you were instrumentally incorrect about what works better or (2) you did not correctly understand the other person's goals.
More generally, the thing you are labeling rationality is what we might call straw vulcan rationality. We don't aspire to be emotionless computrons. We aspire to be better at achieving our goals.
Eliezer wrote a cute piece about how pathetic Spock was to repeatedly predict things had <1% of succeeding when those sorts of things always worked. As outsiders, we can understand why the character said that, but from inside Spock-the-person, being repeated wrong like that shows something is wrong in how one is thinking. Can't find that essay, sorry.
It doesn't bother me, but some people will be bothered by the non-standard font and spacing. I'd tell you how to fix it, but I don't actually know.
Reminds me of this chapter from Eliezer's fanfiction. "Winning" in the naive, common-usage-of-the-word sense doesn't always result in better accomplishing your goals, and it is sometimes "rational" to lose, which means that losing is sometimes "winning" in the LW/rationality sense.
Words are confusing sometimes!
Tims,
It is always a pleasure talking! Thanks for the great link to the straw vulcan rationality. Ironically, what Julia says here is pretty much the point I am trying to make
Humans are irrational by nature; humans are also social by nature. There is individual health and there is social health. Because humans are irrational, often times social health contradicts individual health. That is what I call rationally irrational.
One: what is your evidence that humans are "irrational by nature", and how do you define this irrationality.
Two: I've found that since I started reading LW and trying to put some of its concepts into practice, my ability to handle social situations has actually improved. I am now much better at figuring out what people really want and what I really want, and then finding a way to get both without getting derailed by which options "feel high-status". The specific LW rationality toolkit, at least for me, has been VERY helpful in improving both my individual psychological health and my "social health."
One: I think Lukeprog says it pretty well here:
Two: Good point. Social goals and nonsocial goals are only rarely at odds with one another, so this may not be a particularly fruitful line of thought. Still, it is possible that the idea of rational "irrationality" is neglected here.
This seems implausible on the face of it, as goals in general tend to conflict. Especially to the extent that resources are fungible.
I agree with you on Lukeprog's description being a good one. I'm curious about whether HungryTurtle agrees with this description, too, or whether he's using a more specific sense of "irrational."
hahah than why is smoking cool for many people? Why is binge drinking a sign of status in American colleges? Why do we pull all nighters and damage our health for the pursuit of the perfect paper, party, or performance.
Social goals are a large portion of the time at odds with individual health goals.
I'm probably generalizing too much from my own experience, which is social pressure to get educated and practice other forms of self-improvement. I've never actually seen anyone who considers binge drinking a good thing, so I had just assumed that was the media blowing a few isolated cases out of proportion. I could easily be wrong though.
Do you think humans can avoid interpreting the world symbolically? I do not. The human body, the human brain is hardwired to create symbols. Symbols are irrational. If symbols are irrational, and humans are unable to escape symbols, then humans are fundamentally irrational. That said, I should have added to my above statement that humans are also rational by nature.
Why isn't this just a contradiction? In virtue of what are these two sentences compatible?
I think they're compatible in that the inaccurate phrasing of the original statement doesn't reflect the valid idea behind it. Yobi is right: it's not a clean split into black and white, though the original statement reads like it is. I think it would've been better phrased as, "There are rational sides to humans. There are also irrational sides to humans." The current phrasing suggests the simultaneous presence of two binary states, which would be a contradiction.
In what sense do you mean that symbols are irrational? Is it because they only imperfectly represent the world that is "really out there?" Is there a better option for humans/hypothetical other-minds to use instead of symbols?
Symbols by definition are analogies to reality. Analogies are not rationally based, they are rhetorically based. Rhetoric is by no means rational in the sense that this community uses the word. Therefore language is by definition irrational.
No, that is my point. Humans have no other way to relate to reality. The idea of a better option is a fiction of essentialist philosophy.
I don't know if this is what you were thinking of, but here is what lukeprog wrote about Spock.
I believe this is what he's thinking of.
That's it. Thanks.