No, your example is fine, but I would say it is the most elementary use of this idea. When faced with a serious threat to health it is relatively easy and obvious to realign goal-orientation. It is harder to make such realignments prior to facing serious damage or threats. In your example, a more sophisticated application of this idea would theoretically remove the possibility of twisting an ankle during training, excluding any extreme circumstances.

I imagine this might raise a lot of questions so let me explain a little more.

Training is not serious. The purpose of training is to prepare for a race, but the purpose of training is subsumed over the larger purpose of personal health, happiness, and survival. Therefore, any training one does should always be taken with the context of being trivial in light of these overarching goals. Having this mindset, I do not see how a runner could sprain their ankle, barring extreme circumstances.

A real runner, taking these overarching values into account would

• Prior to running build knowledge about safe running style and practices
• During running be primarily concerned with safety and developing positive running habits rather than meeting some short term goal.

To me, someone who has integrated my idea would never prioritize a race to the point that they risk spraining their ankle in training. Of course there are bizarre situations that are hard/ impossible to plan for. But tripping and twisting your ankle does not seem to be one of these.

Let’s say I am playing soccer. I have decided that any goal-orientation within my soccer game is ultimately not worth the expenditure of resources beyond X amount. Because of this I have tuned out my rational calculating of how to best achieve a social, personal, or game-related victory. To anyone who has not appraised soccer related goal-orientations in this way, my actions would appear irrational within the game. Do you see how this could be considered irrational?

I definitely understand how this idea can also be understood as still rational, it is because of that I called it 'rationally irrational,' implying the actor is never truly abandoning rationality. The reason I choose to word it this way instead of finding some other way to label it as meta-rationality is for rhetorical purposes. This community targets a relatively small demographic of thinkers. That being individuals who have both the capacity and the work history to achieve upper levels of rationality. Perhaps this demographic is the majority within this blog, but I thought it was highly possible that there existed Less Wrong members who were not quite at that level, and that it would be a more symbolically appealing idea if it suggest an element of necessary irrationality within the rationalists paradigm. Maybe this was the a poor choice, but it was what I choose to do.

I think goals can be damaging to themselves. For example, I think anyone who has the explicit goal of becoming the strongest they can be, effectively limits their strength by the very nature of this type of statement.

(nods)

I certainly agree that the goals people can articulate (e.g., "become a world-famous comedian" or "make a trillion dollars" or whatever) are rarely stable over time, and are rarely satisfying once achieved, such that making non-reversible choices (including, as you say, the consumption of resources) to achieve those goals may be something we regret later.

That said, it's not clear that we have alternatives we're guaranteed not to regret.

Incidentally, it's conventional on LW to talk about this dichotomy in terms of "instrumental" and "terminal" goals, with the understanding that terminal goals are stable and worth optimizing for but mostly we just don't know what they are. That said, I'm not a fan of that convention myself, except in the most metaphorical of senses, as I see no reason for believing terminal goals exist at all.