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Hello, people.
I first found Less Wrong when I was reading sci-fi stories on the internet and stumbled across Three Worlds Collide. As someone who places a high value on the ability to make rational decisions, I decided that this site is definitely relevant to my interests. I started reading through the sequences a few months ago, and I recently decided to make an account so that I could occasionally post my thoughts in the comments. I generally only post things when I think I have something particularly insightful to say, so my posts tend to be infrequent. Since I am still reading through the sequences, you probably won't be seeing me commenting on any of the more recent posts for a while.
I'm 21 years old, and I live in Cambridge, Mass. I'm currently working on getting a master's degree in computer science. My classes for the spring term are in machine vision, and computational cognitive science; I have a decent background in AI-related topics. Hopefully I'll be graduating in August, and I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing after that yet.
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Try answering this without any rationalization:
In my middle school science lab, a thermometer showed me that water boiled at 99.5 degrees C and not 100. Why?
You've missed a key point, which is that rationalization refers to a process in which one of many possible hypothesis is arbitrarily selected, which the rationalizer then attempts to support using a fabricated argument. In your query, you are asking that a piece of data be explained. In the first case, one filters the evidence, rejecting any data that too strongly opposes a pre-selected hypothesis. In the second case, one generates a space of hypothesis that all fit the data, and selects the most likely one as a guess. The difference is between choosing data to fit a hypothesis, and finding a hypothesis that best fits the data. Rationalization is pointing to a blank spot on your map and saying, "There must be a lake somewhere around there, because there aren't any other lakes nearby," while ignoring the fact that it's hot and there's sand everywhere.