[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

Unnamed

Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. It is the first post in the series; the introductory post was here, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

Hmm, interesting question.

You weren't too bad, you did a lot to explain the game mechanics to people who didn't click through and read the link, even when said explanation didn't directly contribute to the point you were trying to make.

Being concise is difficult in that you're trying to efficiently explain something, while also not leaving out important details necessary for you to be understood (i.e. keeping the inferential distance short).

Knowing what the audience knows often helps in terms of what can be left out.

What I generally do is write something, then revise it to make it shorter, which typically involves:

trimming out unneeded grammatical constructions (like "you did a lot towards the goal of" -> "you")
rearranging syntax to make the statement more clear (in general, the subject of the sentence should come first, as well as the inferentially closer parts of the statement)
general futzing about with the words until you think they're arranged better

Knowing a specific term for something also makes it easier to express without needing to reexplain all of it every time you use it.

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