The basic questions of rationality

I've been on Less Wrong since its inception, around March 2009. I've read a lot and contributed a lot, and so now I'm more familiar with our jargon, I know of a few more scientific studies, and I might know a couple of useful tricks. Despite all my reading, however, I feel like I'm a far cry from learning rationality. I'm still a wannabe, not an amateur. Less Wrong has tons of information, but I feel like I haven't yet learned the answers to the basic questions of rationality.

I, personally, am a fan of the top-down approach to learning things. Whereas Less Wrong contains tons of useful facts that could, potentially, be put together to answer life's important questions, I really would find it easier if we started with the important questions, and then broke those down into smaller pieces that can be answered more easily.

And so, that's precisely what I'm going to do. Here are, as far as I can tell, the basic questions of rationality—the questions we're actually trying to answer here—along with what answers I've found:

Q: Given a question, how should we go about answering it? A: By gathering evidence effectively, and correctly applying reason and intuition.

Q: How can we effectively gather relevant evidence? A: I don't know. (Controlled experiments? Asking people?)
Q: How can we correctly apply reason? A: If you have infinite computational resources available, use probability theory.
- Q: We don't have infinite computational resources available, so what now? A: I don't know. (Apply Bayes' rule anyway? Just try to emulate what a hypercomputer would do?)
Q: How can we successfully apply intuition? A: By repairing our biases, and developing habits that point us in the right direction under specific circumstances.
- Q: How can we find our biases? A: I don't know. (Read Less Wrong? What about our personal quirks? How can we notice those?)
- Q: Once we find a bias, how can we fix it? A: I don't know. (Apply a correction, test, repeat? Figure out how the bias feels?)
- Q: How can we find out what habits would be useful to develop? A: I don't know. (Examine our past successes and rationalize them?)
- Q: Once we decide on a habit, how can we develop it? A: I don't know. (Sheer practice?)

We could answer some of these questions ourselves, though simple practice and straightforward methods. The method "apply a correction, test, repeat", for example, is so generally useful that it deserves to be called the Fundamental Algorithm of Control. Nevertheless, since Less Wrong is devoted to developing human rationality, surely it contains answers to these questions somewhere. Where are they?

Q: Given a question, how should we go about answering it? A: By gathering evidence effectively, and correctly applying reason and intuition.

Q: How can we effectively gather relevant evidence? A: I don't know. (Controlled experiments? Asking people?)
Q: How can we correctly apply reason? A: If you have infinite computational resources available, use probability theory.
- Q: We don't have infinite computational resources available, so what now? A: I don't know. (Apply Bayes' rule anyway? Just try to emulate what a hypercomputer would do?)
Q: How can we successfully apply intuition? A: By repairing our biases, and developing habits that point us in the right direction under specific circumstances.
- Q: How can we find our biases? A: I don't know. (Read Less Wrong? What about our personal quirks? How can we notice those?)
- Q: Once we find a bias, how can we fix it? A: I don't know. (Apply a correction, test, repeat? Figure out how the bias feels?)
- Q: How can we find out what habits would be useful to develop? A: I don't know. (Examine our past successes and rationalize them?)
- Q: Once we decide on a habit, how can we develop it? A: I don't know. (Sheer practice?)

Q: How can we effectively gather relevant evidence? A: I don't know. (Controlled experiments? Asking people?)

Depends on the question. Lukeprog wrote a post about how to do scholarship, often self experimentation is a quick and easy way of getting data, and sometimes you can just asking someone or google it.

I should find that post by lukeprog, since it definitely sounds like the sort of thing I'm looking for here. My chain of questions can end either by saying "I don't know", or by linking to another post, and other reading material is obviously more useful than the phrase "I don't know".

Q: How can we successfully apply intuition? A: By repairing our biases, and developing habits that point us in the right direction under specific circumstances.

By trying to dodge biases, not confront them. If you realize that you dislike someone and that is affecting your judgement, the wrong way to go about it is to try to fudge factor it back like "I hate that bob is trying to convince me that X is small. I still think its big, but maybe I should subtract 50 because I'm biased". The problem with this approach is that you cant reverse stupidity. The way you came up with the inital answer has to do with disliking a person, not the territory, so in order to have an accurate and narrow response your fudge factor would have to have to depend on reality anyway.

Its better to just let the "I hate bob. Screw that guy!" process run in the background and practice dissociating it from the decision mechanism, which is something completely different. Don't even ask yourself what that part thinks.

I'm not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn't reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.

So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be useful in certain circumstances. In particular, correcting the bias should be a useful method as long as two things are true: you understand the bias well enough to correct it successfully; and, once you've corrected the bias, you end up with a useful heuristic.

"I don't like Bob, so things he says are probably wrong" is simply an example of a heuristic that, once de-biased, no longer says anything at all, and is thus useless.

I'm not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn't reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.
So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be

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4dbaupp15y

I believe that the grandparent is referring to this one: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/

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The basic questions of rationality

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The basic questions of rationality

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