You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Mercurial comments on People who "don't rationalize"? [Help Rationality Group figure it out] - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Mercurial 02 March 2012 11:38PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (85)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Mercurial 03 March 2012 06:56:27AM 1 point [-]

Good points.

I'm not trying to sneak in connotations, by the way. We're just talking about the fact that these people seem to be quite good at things like goal-factoring, VOI calculations, etc.

Comment author: steven0461 03 March 2012 11:15:51PM 2 points [-]

I didn't mean to say the sneaking was intentional. VOI calculations seem like they would correlate more with intelligence than rationality as such. I can't find any reference to goal-factoring; what do you mean by that?

Comment author: malcolmocean 17 March 2013 10:40:57AM 0 points [-]

I know this is much later, but for future readers I thought I'd chime in that goal-factoring is a process of breaking your goals down into subgoals and so on. At each level, you ask yourself "what am I trying to achieve with this?" and then ask yourself if there might be a better/cheaper/more efficient way to do so.

This is very closely related to the idea of purchasing goods separately.

[I attended January 2013 CFAR workshop and volunteered at the March one.]