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Davorak comments on Beyond Smart and Stupid - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (44)
I have always thought that noticing success and failure was a key part of being a great rationalist. How can you improve if you can not tell a success from a failure? How can you decided to update or say oops?
There are many instances of great rationalists who never admit to being wrong, even after being demonstrated convincingly to be wrong.
Can you give an example? My initial reaction is that I could only consider such rationalists decent and only if their failure to update was in a narrow field. Great rationalist should be good and epistemic rationality and should be able to update based on convincing evidence.
One of the reasons I dislike "rationalist" as a term is that it tends to produce namespace collisions between its senses of "one who practices rationality" and "one who produces results useful to rational decision-making". I suspect one such collision is responsible for this particular confusion.
I am not sure I follow your second definition let me reword part of your two definitions to make sure I parsed it correctly.
"one who practices rationality" vs "one who produces results considered rational in retrospect"
Do these match your pair?
I was trying to make more of a use/implementation distinction. People around here frequently use the word "rationalist" to refer to the people involved in creating or popularizing the theory of rationality, but it often happens that those people failed to fully internalize their theory, applied it only selectively, or (generously) lived in a cultural environment that limited its full expression.
Your pair also looks like a useful distinction, but I'd break that one down more in terms of conscious awareness of the art. A lot of disciplines demand aspects of instrumental rationality, but producing good results in them isn't necessarily the result of a formalizable process, so I don't think it's proper to speak of every high-level businessman or professional poker player, say, as a master rationalist.
I agree completely. I do not think of them as my pair, they were just a tool to help understand your pair.
I now think I understand the pair you were trying to communicate. When I read great rationalist I think of someone who has successfully applied rationality over a great breadth of their life. So "one who practices rationality" but are not "one who produces results useful to rational decision-making" and those that "one who produces results useful to rational decision-making" but are not "one who practices rationality" have both only implement rationality in a limited breadth of their life and I would not have described either as great rationalists, at least when keeping all other variables equal.
Fair enough, but I'm not trying to establish a definition, only to point out that people here use the word to indicate both components alone as well as their conjunction, and that doing so has the potential to generate confusion.
I offer the following as a data point for calibration: I think you had already communicated effectively that you were not trying to establish a definition.
I also agree.
I can give examples of great rationalists who never admitted to being wrong in particular debates. Some defenders of the phlogiston theory whose names I can't remember. Einstein. Numerous famous biologists in their attacks on sociobiology. Other famous biologists in their attacks on group selection. I'm pretty sure you could come up with a nonending stream of examples if you studied the history of science.
There are a few people here on LessWrong whom I think are great rationalists, in an absolute sense; but who AFAIK have never acknowledged being caught in a mistake. That indicates something wrong. Even if you really never have made a mistake, that would indicate that you haven't tried anything hard.
(P.S. - You get no credit for changing your mind by realizing your error yourself, partial credit for changing your mind after reading something written by a non-threatening dead person, and full credit for admitting to someone during an argument that they were right and you were wrong.)
I'd agree with that assessment.
But I give plenty of credit for that. :)
Ok, I think I understand your meaning of "great rationalist" now. You are talking about people who helped humanity make great advances but at some point claimed certainty where they should have said "I don't know." They failed to discern the edge of their knowledge, ran off a cliff and then denied it. Would that be fair?
Am sceptical - everyone makes mistakes - that's an important way of learning.
Surely everyone has at least one "mistake" anecdote, that's innocent enough to confess to - even if they mostly want to signal their flawlessness.
There are many instances of great rationalists who never admit to being wrong in one particular debate, even after being demonstrated convincingly to be wrong.
A much weaker thesis.
Perhaps don't be too hard on people for what they don't do.
Instead, treat each message you do receive as a blessing!