If we had a complete definition of rationality, we'd be done with creating AI. That is, by and large, what this site is all about - trying to arrive at a complete definition.
I just want to clarify. I am not trying to get a completed definition. That would be good, but I think it would be extremely hard to do. I am just looking for a more useful definition. I think that the current definition may be limited in its usefulness due to the reasons I gave above.
As far as I can tell, no, such approaches just make irrational people irrational in a more sophisticated way. Most people don't have the flexibility of self to actually -change- those aspects of themselves that are irrational.
This sounds too pessimistic to me. I also don’t buy into the defeatism of the idea that people don’t have the flexibility to become more rational. Perhaps, it’s true that most people aren’t motivated enough or that the best path to becoming rational is not obvious enough which makes it so that people have to spend lots of effort if they wish to become more rational. Both of these issues, I think, would be helped if the approaches I alluded to where described.
they just bury them under increasingly complex rationality models that do nothing but make their rationalizations sound more rational, and anything like calling people on their rationalizations falls into some area of mindkilling or another.
This was described in knowing biases can hurt people. It is why brevity and unapplied knowledge can be dangerous. The biggest problem with the type of person you describe above is that they know about rationality, but are still distorting feedback. It is a case of compartmentalization. Their knowledge of rationality would help them describe why other people are being rational or irrational, but they fail to correctly apply this knowledge to themselves.
If being wrong feels like failure, your failure is deeper than being wrong.
I think we are looking at this in different ways. By becoming less wrong I just mean coming to understand that you are implemented on kludgy and limited wetware (a human brain), which leads you to have certain propensities and tendencies. Through this understanding you can start to debiase, i.e. recognise these propensities and when alternative, non default, methods would better help you to achieve what you desire.
There is no sense of failure in this, though. Perhaps, a better way to phrase it is that I want to become better.
stop caring so much about being less wrong than other people.
This is not a race and I am not comparing myself to other people. Once again, perhaps, becoming better is a more suitable description. This doesn’t necessarily mean better than others. It just means better than you are currently are.
rational (which is, after all, merely a proxy for intelligent) you are.
I disagree with you on that. Extremely intelligent people can still be irrational. Intelligence is basically about cognitive abilities whereas rationality is more about how you reason.
Also, this
many biases are not very strongly correlated with measures of intelligence (algorithmic capacity). Additionally, there is reliable variance in rational thinking found even after cognitive ability is controlled,
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This website, for many people, is just a way of filling a void in their sense of self-worth, through an addiction to insight, to revelation, to that awe-inspiring feeling of getting smarter, of understanding the universe just a little bit better - without ever actually changing anything. They feel momentarily like smarter people, the feeling fades leaving them empty, and nothing changes.
That sounds similar to all self-help type of stuff. You need to apply it. If you don’t apply what you have learnt, then it is close to useless.
In summary, the goal of this post is to start a discussion on the current meaning of 'rationality' as it is defined on less wrong. I am specifically trying to find out:
I think that the description below from the What Do We Mean By 'Rationality' post sums up the current meaning of 'rationality' as it is used on this site:
Now, I think that the definition or description of 'rationality' above is pretty good. In fact, if I wanted to introduce someone to the concept of rationality then I would probably refer to it, but I would explain that it is a working definition. This means that it conveys the general idea and that most of the time this suffices. I have no problems with working definitions. One of my favorite ideas on less wrong is the idea that words and concepts are pointers to areas in concept space. This idea allows you to use working definitions and to not waste your time on semantic issues. But, I think that an often neglected aspect of this idea is that you still need to ensure that the words you use point to the right and restricted areas in concept space. When people say "I am not here to argue about definitions", this does not abdicate their responsibility to create decent definitions. It is like saying: "hey, I know that this definition is not perfect, but I think that it's close enough that it will be able to convey the general idea that I am getting at". If that is all that you are trying to do, then avoiding refining your definitions is fine, but it should be noted that the more important and cited the concept becomes the more neccesary it is to improve the definitions of the concept.
I think the definition of rationality above has two major problems:
Perhaps the biggest issue I have with the definition is not anything to do with how it currently is, but instead with how hard it is to improve. This sounds like a good thing, but it's not. The definition is hard to improve, not because it is perfect, but because instrumental rationality is just too big. Any ideas or improvements to the definition that would seem plausible are likely to be quickly discarded as they can be made to fall into the instrumental rationality category.
I am not going to be providing a better definition of 'rationality' as the goal of this post is just to start a discussion, but I do think that a lot of the problems I have mentioned above can be best solved by first choosing a simple core definition of what it means to be rational and then having a seperate myriad of areas in which improvements lead to increases in rationality. In general, the more granularised, results-orientated and verified each of these areas is the better.
A possible parent or base definition for 'rationality' is already on the wiki. It says that 'rationality' is the: "characteristic of thinking and acting optimally". This, to me, seems like a pretty good starting point, although, I do admit that the definition itself is too concise and that it doesn't really tell us much since 'optimal' is also hard to define.
That is not to say that we don't have any idea of what 'optimal' means, we do. It is just that this understanding (logic, probability and decision theory etc.) is mostly related to the normative sense of the word. This is a problem because we are agents with certain limitations and adaptations which make it so that our attempts to do things the normative way are often impractical, cumbersome and flawed. It is for this reason that any definition of 'rationality' should be about more than just: 'get closer to the normative model'. Of course, getting closer to the results of the normative model is always good, but I still think that a decent definition of 'rationality' should take into account, for example, ecological and bounded rationality as well as the values of the agent under consideration.