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steven0461 comments on It's okay to be (at least a little) irrational - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
If "OK" means "morally good" then it cashes out in the same way any claim about morality cashes out. ISTM that on this interpretation "irrationality is not OK" can logically be true at the same time as "it's OK to consider irrationality OK".
It doesn't matter I guess, after infotropism's comment I agree this isn't the most reasonable interpretation.
There are many, many things for which we need a constant rolling sense of "OK for all moments before now, but not OK for all moments from now into the future". So I forgive myself for all past instances of irrationality, which permits me to admit them to myself without shame and so avoid the cognitive dissonance trap; but I don't give myself permission to be irrational in the future. This of course is a very poor fit for the way we are used to thinking about ourselves, and that's one of the biggest challenges in aspiring to rationality.
This is the "growth" mindset, actually. There's very little that it can't be usefully applied to.
Where does that terminology come from?
The work of Carol Dweck, see the book "Mindsets". I also recently wrote a blog post that ties her work together with Seligman's 3Ps/optimism model, and my own "pain/gain" and "successful/struggling" models, at: http://dirtsimple.org/2009/03/stumbling-on-success.html
I expect to be writing more on this soon, as this weekend I found a connection between the "fixed" mindset and "all-or-nothing" thinking in several areas I hadn't previously considered candidates for such.
Under which conditions would the negation of the first part of the sentence be worth while?
Assuming a rational, human agent, are there any worthwhile behavior heuristics which lead to statements that follow this pattern: "This behavior will not be ok for me in the future, and has never been ok for me in the past"?
That depends on something other than the words you use -- it depends on whether "not ok" is being interpreted as referring to the person or the behavior.
In terms of effectiveness at changing behavior, our friends in the religious conspiracy got at least one thing right: "love the sinner, hate the sin."