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Comments (45)
I don't know a lot about martial arts, so I looked them up. Wikipedia, line one:
So far so good for the analogy. Rationality is a system of practices and traditions of thinking. Wikipedia, line two:
Now I'm stumped. Does rationality have an objective?
My understanding from movies is that a trained martial artist can defeat an untrained opponent, even if that opponent is larger or has better weapons. Or, as in the post, break a thick board with his fist. What opponents can you defeat or what cool tricks can you do with rationality training, that you couldn't without?
I would say that the analogous objective of rationality is to protect oneself from mental threats: dark arts, misleading questions, tempting but wrong arguments... where specific biases would constitute specific types of attacks.
A couple interesting corellaries from that line of thought: 1) like in a physical situation, mere awareness of the form an attack may take doesn't always help; 2) like martial arts, in mental defense you have the option of developing a large number of highly specific defenses, or a smaller number of more generic ones
It does seem a little limiting to consider rationality nothing more than a mental form of self-defense, but I would argue that the higher levels of martial arts offer far more than that, and like rationality aim (among other things) for holistic life improvement.
An anecdote from my martial arts background:
A student asked, "Sensei, what would you say if I came into the dojo tomorrow and told you I had been attacked in a dark alley, and that I had protected my child who was with me, and defeated my attackers, and escaped unharmed?"
The teacher responded, "I would say that I had failed you as a teacher, because the ultimate goal of our art is not to defeat attackers, but simply not to be present when the attack comes."
Isn't the objective of rationality to correctly align our beliefs with reality, so that they may pay rent when we try to achieve our goals?
Protecting oneself against manipulation, learning to argue correctly and getting used to being defeated are all byproducts of the fact that there is only one reality, independent of the mind.
I like this formulation
by itself.
I think that we can take something clear and simple from the posts below: rationality should not only help you to accomplish your goals, but also to define goals clearly and identify easy and (more importantly) useful goals that are likely to induce a prolonged (preferably indefinitely so) period of well being.
Can we at least agree that these three imperatives
are not identical? There seems to a be "rationality thesis" here that the best way to go about 2. and 3. is to sort out 1. first. I would like to see this thesis stated more clearly.
This may very well be the case today, or in our society, but it's not really difficult to imagine a society in which you have to 'hold' really crazy idea in order to win. Also, believing true things is an endeavour which is never completed per se: it surely is not possible to have it sorted out simpliciter before attaining 2 (the third imperative I really see as a subgoal of the second one).
The thesis after all conflicts with basically all history of humanity: homo sapiens has won more and more without attaining a perfect accuracy. However it seems to me that it had won more where it accumulated a greater amount of truths.
So I won't really say that in order to win you have to be accurate, but I think a strong case can be made that accuracy enhances the probability of winning.
What is then the real purpose of rationality? I'm perfectly fine if we accept the conjunction "truth /\ winning", with the provision that P(winning | high degree of truth) > P(winning | low degree of truth). However, if Omega is going to pop-up and ask:
I confess I would guiltily choose the second.
Sure. The objective of rationality is to achieve your goals as well as possible. Rationality doesn't tell you what you goals are, and martial arts don't tell you which people to defeat.
It does, surprisingly. If you don't know what your goals are, there are worse and better ways of figuring that out, with errors on this level having pronounced if subtly hard-to-notice consequences. There is probably even a sense in which it's impossible to know your goals (or their definition, etc.) exactly, to reach a point where you are allowed to stop creatively working on the question.
I agree, that it rationality should help you figure out your instrumental goals, but it's easy to view this as 'a way to better achieve your higher level goals'.
Not just instrumental goals. If you believe that you should achieve something, it doesn't automatically mean that you really should. Your belief is a fact about your brain, which is not always in good alignment with your values (even though it really tries).
When you notice that you want something (as a terminal goal), you are reflecting on the fact that your brain, probably the best value-estimating apparatus you've got, has calculated that pursuing this goal is good. It could be wrong, it's your job now to figure out if it made an error in that judgment. Maybe you can find a way to improve on its reasoning process, compensating for a specific flaw and thus gaining access to a superior conclusion produced by the improved procedure (which is often ultimately the point of knowing how things work). (Or maybe you'll even find an argument that makes taking into account what your own brain tells you in a given instance a bad idea.)
But where do values reside? How do you know that your belief did not correspond to your values?
Where does truth about arithmetic reside? How can you ever find out that you've miscalculated something? Apply similar principles to moral questions.
Too general, and maybe false. Many people, rational and not, are interested in and successful at achieving their goals well. And: less wrong is sometimes a seminar on how to achieve your goals, but it is not always and only that (I hope!).
They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally "interested and successful at achieving" all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
You say "all else equal" here. But all else clearly isn't equal - they have different genders.
All else being equal, yes I'd expect deadlift weight to be somewhat correlated with rationality.
You assumed that Alice was a girl (normally a good guess), but I never mentioned his gender in my thought-experiment. Then again, they have different names, etc...But this misses the point of my "all else equal" clause, which refers to their interestedness and succesfulness (besides their (probable) success at deadlifting), not a myriad of accidental features.
No. It is incredibly weak evidence that Bob is more rational than Alice.
Many people, martial artists and not, are interested in defending themselves and others from physical threat. That doesn't mean that Wikipedia's definition of martial arts is too general or false.
(Although, actually, it's too specific, in this case, since a lot of martial artists are not interested in the defense aspects, but more in physical fitness or enlightenment or whatever).
By "many people" I might have meant "every creature that can be said to have goals at all."
I could quibble with "successful at", but I think the analogy still holds in any case. Virtually everyone is interested in defending themselves, at least, from physical threat.
Martial arts are one approach to being more effective at defense, and rationality is a similar approach to being more effective at reaching goals in general.
We should absolutely be quibbling about "successful." Someone comes to me with advice for achieving my goals: "I know just the ticket, all you have to do is swallow this giant pack of lies." Well, couldn't they be right?
I think it's a rare individual who would actually be in less physical danger if they were better at martial arts. The scope of rationality is similarly limited -- it's not useful for every one, or for every goal.
Do you think that because you believe most people don't experience physical danger? Or because you think that martial arts is ineffective in dealing with the most common types of danger? Or some other reason?
I think martial arts are unnecessary for dealing with the most common types of danger.
The most valuable lesson I ever learned from martial arts was how to fall down without hurting myself, and I'd say this is a skill that would help most people significantly reduce the number and severity of physical injuries they experience over their lifetime.