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AspiringKnitter comments on Rationally Irrational - Less Wrong
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Supposing that you lived in a universe where you could pray for and would then always receive infallible instruction, it would be rational to pray.
If it leads to winning more than other possibilities, it's rational to do it. If your utility function values pretending to be stupid so you'll be well-liked by idiots, that is winning.
Key phrase. The accurate map leads to more winning. Acknowledging that X obviously doesn't work, but pretending that it does in order to win is very different from thinking X works.
ETA: It is all fine and dandy that I am getting upvotes for this, and by all means don't stop, but really I am just a novice applying Rationality 101 whereever I see fit in order to earn my black belt.
What evidence is there that the map is static? We make maps and the world transforms. Rivers become canyons; mountains become mole hills (pardon the rhetorical ring I could not resist). Given that all maps are approximations isn't it rational to moderate one's navigation with the occasional off course exploration to verify that not drastic changes have occurred in the geography?
And because I feel the analogy is pretty far removed at this point, what I mean by that, is that if we have charted a goal-orientation based on our map that puts us on a specific trajectory, would it not be beneficial to occasional abandon our goal-orientation to explore other trajectories for potentially new and more lucrative paths.
The evidence that the territory is static is called Physics. The laws does not change, and the elegant counterargument against anti-inductionism is that if induction didn't work our brains would stop working, because our brains depend on static laws.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the map is static. It should never be, you should always be prepared to update, there isn't a universal prior that lets you reason inductively about any universe.
Why would that not be part of the trajectory traced out by your goal-orientation, or a natural interaction between the fuzziness of your map and your goals?
Well you would try to have that as part of your trajectory, but what I am suggesting is that there will always be things beyond your planning, beyond your reasoning, so in light of this perhaps we should strategically deviate from those plans every now and then to double check what else is out there.
I'm still confused by what you're considering inside my reasoning and outside my planning / reasoning. If I say "spend 90% of your time in the area with the highest known EV and 10% of your time measuring areas which have at least a 1% chance of having higher reward than the current highest EV, if they exist," then isn't my ignorance about the world part of my plan / reasoning, such that I don't need to deviate from those plans to double check?
Personally, I think that behavior should be rewarded.
Thank you, and I share that view. Why don't we see everyone doing it? Why, I would be overjoyed if everyone was so firmly trained in Rat101 that comments like these were not special.
But now I am deviating into a should-world + diff.
I'm pretty sure we do see everyone doing it. Randomly selecting a few posts, in The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes the vast majority of comments received at least one upvote, the Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit thread have slightly more than 50% upvoted comments and the Rationally Irrational comments also have more upvoted than not.
It seems to me that most reasonably-novel insights are worth at least an upvote or two at the current value.
EDIT: Just in case this comes off as disparaging LW's upvote generosity or average comment quality, it's not.
Though among LW members, people probably don't need to be encouraged to use basic rationality. If we could just upvote and downvote people's arguments in real life...
I'm also considering the possibility that MHD was asking why we don't see everyone using Rationality 101.
I'm talking about the real world, not an imaginary one. You can make up imaginary worlds to come up with a counterexample to any generalisation you hear, but it amounts to saying "Suppose that were false? Then it would be false!"