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shminux comments on Rationality and Winning - Less Wrong
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Comments (83)
I'm having trouble calling a person who can rattle out a perfectly rational thing to do in every circumstance but instead spending their life complaining about how they would do this and that if only they didn't have akrasia a rational one.
you can be an expert on rationality without being an expert at rationality.
With that terminology, I would read shminux's comment as saying: "I have trouble calling rational a person who is an expert on rationality but not an expert at rationality." Where is the failure?
I may have slightly misread shminux's post, or failed to make my point (which I have now forgotten). I will patch my post to at least make sense.
"... those who cannot, teach."
"Those who can, do, those who know, teach"
The less cynical and more realistic original formulation
Unfortunately, in practice, those who don't know like to teach too. Fortunately, some of those who can, also teach, so you could listen to those who can.
That's what akrasia means. That your actions differ from your spoken intentions in certain ways. In your example, the intentions are rational, the actions are not - in a particular pattern we call akrasia.
It comes down to what you identify with more as a "person". The fragment who acts? Or the fragment who talks about how they wish to act differently? And which fragment do you want to assist in making the other fragment be more like them - the intentions like the actions, or the other way around?
There is an smbc for that.
just world fallacy at 10 upvotes. wonderful.
edit: unless you mean "rattling" to tell us that they don't really know and they're just making noises. If that is the point it would be nice if you were explicit about it.
Feel free to explain how irrational actions (despite rational words/intentions) constitute a just world fallacy. Sure, you can call akrasia an incurable disease and give up, or you can keep trying to win despite it. Some have.
people exist who are good at figuring out the best thing to do and not good at doing it. These people are not necessarrilly irrational. e.g. it's hard for a parapelegic to be good at tennis, or an idiot to be good at maths. The playing field is not level.
Yes, absolutely. Then a rational thing to do would be figuring out what they are good at doing, and start doing it. Does not mean it is easy, just rational.
A paraplegic can find something else to be good at. We had a quadriplegic mayor here for awhile.
Design your own playing field.
"Find or make a niche" is not a strategy someone can automatically pull off when they hit a certain level of rationality. That someone has not successfully done so does not mean they are irrational. Your original comment implies (basically states) that someone who is not getting anything done is, QED, not rational. This is nonsense for the same reason.
You are proposing solutions for which rationality is not the sole determiner of success. people can fail for reasons other than irrationality. Emblematic example of the just world fallacy, with justice here being "rational people succeed."
It seems that you are intent on applying this label, no matter what, so I will disengage.
You're changing the subject. The question was whether actually having akrasia is compatible with rationality. The question was not whether someone who claims to have akrasia actually has akrasia, or whether it is rational for someone who has akrasia to complain about akrasia and treat it as not worth trying to solve.
Having akrasia is no more compatible with rationality than having myopia is: saying “if only I had better eyesight” while not wearing eyeglasses is not terribly rational.
I'm pretty sure I expressed my opinion on this topic precisely ("no, it's not compatible"). It's up to you how you choose to misunderstand it, I have no control over it.
Do you agree the quoted property differs from the property of "having akrasia" (which is the property we're interested in); that one might have akrasia without spending one's life complaining about it, and that one might spend one's life complaining about akrasia without having (the stated amount of) akrasia (e.g. with the deliberate intent to evade obligations)? If this inaccuracy were fixed, would your original response retain all its rhetorical force?
(It's worth keeping in mind that "akrasia" is more a problem description saying someone's brain doesn't produce the right output, and not an actual specific mechanism sitting there impeding an otherwise-functioning brain from doing its thing, but I don't think that affects any of the reasoning here.)
Agreed completely. If you can't use it, you didn't learn it.