Comment on Making Rationality General-Interest

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 01:51:37 GMT

Short: epistemic=believing things on purpose, instrumental=doing things on purpose for thought-out reasons.

It's worth noting that this is different from how CFAR and the Sequences tend to think about rationality. They would say that someone whose beliefs are relatively unreflective and unexamined but more reliably true is more epistemically rational than someone who less reliably true beliefs who has examined and evaluated those beliefs much more carefully. I believe they'd also say that someone who acts with less deliberation and has fewer explicit reasons, but reliably gets better results, is more rational than a more reflective but ineffective individual.

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