But this is one of my issues with what I have seen at lesswrong - the privileging of predictive utility over other forms of epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality is another form of instrumental rationality, but where rationalists gather, it gets privileged as if it were the only true rationality, or at least a better rationality. It's a mistake, and really impairs the ability of rationalists to understand other people who do not privilege epsitemic rationality to the same degree, if at all.

You say improper is not used in a pejorative sense, but clearly the normal usage of "improper" is pejorative. And when an epistemic utitlity competes with another instrumental utility, why doesn't that equally make the epistemic utility improper?

Further, the non-epistemic beliefs are described as

but the other forms are arguably "not belief at all".

TIme and time again, epistemic rationality is set up as the real, better, higher, truer, shinier rationality.

Just to be clear, I'm not here to trash the idea here. I came to the site from reading EY's Harry Potter fan fiction, which is just awesome and I've dying for the next chapter. Between the book, and the sequences, I'm busy reading a guy making all my arguments and more, reading many of the key books I read years ago in graduate school. Korzybski and Jaynes are at the top of my pantheon (with Stirner, who I don't see a lot of influence from). So I'm here because of some very specific and fundamental shared methodology.

I don't say "me too" to all that I agree with, unless it is something new to me or I have a refinement to add. But on this point, I see privileging of epistemic rationality, and I think it's a mistake.