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mark_spottswood comments on The Costs of Rationality - Less Wrong
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My definition differs from the one in Wikipedia because I require that your goals not call for any particular ritual of cognition. When you care more about winning then about any particular way of thinking - and "winning" is not defined in such a way as to require in advance any particular method of thinking - then you are pursuing rationality.
This, in turn, ends up implying epistemic rationality: if the definition of "winning" doesn't require believing false things, then you can generally expect to do better (on average) by believing true things than false things - certainly in real life, despite various elaborate philosophical thought experiments designed from omniscient truth-believing third-person standpoints.
Conversely you can start with the definition of rational belief as accuracy-seeking, and get to pragmatics via "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" and the notion of rational policies as those which you would retain even given an epistemically rational prediction of their consequences.
Eliezer said: This, in turn, ends up implying epistemic rationality: if the definition of "winning" doesn't require believing false things, then you can generally expect to do better (on average) by believing true things than false things - certainly in real life, despite various elaborate philosophical thought experiments designed from omniscient truth-believing third-person standpoints.
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I think this is overstated. Why should we only care what works "generally," rather than what works well in specific subdomains? If rationality means whatever helps you win, than overconfidence will often be rational. (Examples: placebo effect, dating, job interviews, etc.) I think you need to either decide that your definition of rationality does not always require a preference for true beliefs, or else revise the definition.
It also might be worthwhile, for the sake of clarity, to just avoid the word "rationality" altogether in future conversations. It seems to be at risk of becoming an essentially contested concept, particularly because everyone wants to be able to claim that their own preferred cognitive procedures are "rational." Why not just talk about whether a particular cognitive ritual is "goal-optimizing" when we want to talk about Eliezer-rationality, while saving the term "truth-optimizing" (or some variant) for epistemic-rationality?
Maybe "truth-seeking" versus "winning", if there's a direct appeal to one and not the other. But I am generally willing to rescue the word "rationality".
Sorry -- I meant, but did not make clear, that the word "rationality" should be avoided only when the conversation involves the clash between "winning" and "truth seeking." Otherwise, things tend to bog down in arguments about the map, when we should be talking about the territory.
I agree – in contexts where 'truth seeking' and 'winning' are different, we should qualify references to 'rationality'.