There's a core meme of rationalism that I think is fundamentally off-base. It's been bothering me for a long time — over a year now. It hasn't been easy for me, living this double life, pretending to be OK with propagating an instrumentally expedient idea that I know has no epistemic grounding. So I need to get this off my chest now: Our established terminology is not consistent with an evidence-based view of the Star Trek canon.
According to TVtropes, a straw Vulcan is a character used to show that emotion is better than logic. I think a lot of people take "straw Vulcan rationality" it to mean something like, "Being rational does not mean being like Vulcans from Star Trek."
This is not fair to Vulcans from Star Trek.
Central to the character of Spock — and something that it's easy to miss if you haven't seen every single episode and/or read a fair amount of fan fiction — is that he's being a Vulcan all wrong. He's half human, you see, and he's really insecure about that, because all the other kids made fun of him for it when he was growing up on Vulcan. He's spent most of his life resenting his human half, trying to prove to everyone (especially his father) that he's Vulcaner Than Thou. When the Vulcan Science Academy worried that his human mother might be an obstacle, it was the last straw for Spock. He jumped ship and joined Starfleet. Against his father's wishes.
Spock is a mess of poorly handled emotional turmoil. It makes him cold and volatile.
Real Vulcans aren't like that. They have stronger and more violent emotions than humans, so they've learned to master them out of necessity. Before the Vulcan Reformation, they were a collection of warring tribes who nearly tore their planet apart. Now, Vulcans understand emotions and are no longer at their mercy. Not when they apply their craft successfully, anyway. In the words of the prophet Surak, who created these cognitive disciplines with the purpose of saving Vulcan from certain doom, "To gain mastery over the emotions, one must first embrace the many Guises of the Mind."
Successful application of Vulcan philosophy looks positively CFARian.
There is a ritual called "kolinahr" whose purpose is to completely rid oneself of emotion, but it was not developed by Surak, nor, to my knowledge, was it endorsed by him. It's an extreme religious practice, and I think the wisest Vulcans would consider it misguided1. Spock attempted kolinahr when he believed Kirk had died, which I take to be a great departure from cthia (the Vulcan Way) — not because he ultimately failed to complete the ritual2, but because he tried to smash his problems with a hammer rather than applying his training to sort things out skillfully. If there ever were such a thing as a right time for kolinahr, that would not have been it.
So Spock is both a straw Vulcan and a straw man of Vulcans. Steel Vulcans are extremely powerful rationalists. Basically, Surak is what happens when science fiction authors try to invent Eliezer Yudkowsky without having met him.
1) I admit that I notice I'm a little confused about this. Sarek, Spock's father and a highly influential diplomat, studied for a time with the Acolytes of Gol, who are the masters of kolinahr. If I've ever known what came of that, I've forgotten. I'm not sure whether that's canon, though.
2) "Sorry to meditate and run, but I've gotta go mind-meld with this giant space crystal thing. ...It's complicated."
Take the koan that Eliezer wrote. To be explicit, l reading the koan forces the reading into accepting the frame that a koan is a valid teaching tool.
The koan is about how a master gives his student a funny hat. Master Eliezer gives his reader a koan. The novice rationalist thinks Eliezer is wise so he accepts being taught through a koan.
He personally didn't get it in the first read but took a short time to process it to be fair I generally don't expect people on LW to make points on that level so I'm not focusing on reading on that level.
Moving in environments where people do take care to communicate on that level is useful for training to sense the narrative in that discussion.
Let's go back to Brienne"s examples of Tell Culture communication I labeled Vulcan: ""I just realized this interaction will be far more productive if my brain has food. I think we should head toward the kitchen."
I"m heavily underweight, if I hear that sentence speaker by someone with my own weight my brain would go: "I understand why you are underweight if you have that little relationship to what your body is doing that you don't recognize hunger and need some stimulus such as your brain getting foggy to be motivated to get food. There a good chance that I would confront the person about it.
If I hear a fat person saying that I might think: "Okay, this person obviously feels very bad about gives his body the foot it desires so he gives himself a silly excuse about how his brain needs food instead of being honest about his hunger." I might laugh but depending on my relationship to the person and how confrontative I want to be I might or might not call the person on it.
The thing about the food is a fairly simple story. Humans generally eat because they are hungry. If you are in social discussion with other people you might want to start to listen on that level.
The interesting thing about stories is that you don't need to be consciously aware of a story to process it and show reactions to it. On a NLP seminar it can be hard to follow what's said because 3-4 story strings can be active at the same time. Once quite remarkable experience was a dozen people in the audience bursting out in tears but not really knowing why because a part of the story just revolved that they weren't paying conscious attention to.
A more practical exercise would be to look at your day and asking yourself what story it tells. The hero came home from work and then spend 2 hours watching TV and three hours browsing reddit is no good story. As a heuristic if your day provides for a good story it's usually a good day even from a more utility maximizing strategy.
If you always do the thing that the story asks for than you aren't procrastinating. That doesn't mean that you always have to do the thing the story asks for but being aware helps.
If you can see the role you play out in story you can manage some fairly challenging social situations because you have perspective. If the role you play it leads to being angry at the role I play but that doesn't hurt me on a fundamental level when I see the roles and how the narrative of the situation calls for it. If my role has to serve as target towards another person has to challenge their anger to grow in their own development, so what if the story progresses into the right direction?
To close the koan loop, maybe the story would normally call you to get angry back at the other person for being angry at you. If you are completely aware of the story that becomes silly, Buddhist enlightenment is about moving beyond the story and losing your entanglement. Last week I had a situation where someone was angry with me because of their prejudices and I was just laughing and had very much fun with the situation and at the end of the interaction the person recognized the silliness of their own behavior and thanked me.