How has Rationality, as a universal theory (or near-universal) on decision making, confronted its most painful weaknesses? What are rationality's weak points? The more broad a theory is claimed to be, the more important it seems to really test the theory's weaknesses -- that is why I assume you bring up religion, but the same standard should apply to rationality. This is not a cute question from a religious person, more of an intellectual inquiry from a person hoping to learn. In honor of the grand-daddy of cognitive biases, confirmation bias, doesn't rational choice theory need to be vetted?

HungryTurtle makes an attempt to get to this question, but he gets too far into the weeds -- this allowed LW to simply compare the "cons" of religion with the "cons" of rationality -- this is a silly inquiry -- I don't care how the weaknesses of rationality compares to the weaknesses of Judaism because rational theory, if universally applicable with no weaknesses, should be tested on the basis of that claim alone, and not its weaknesses relative to some other theory.

NOTE: re-posting without offending language in the hopes i dont need to create a new name. looks like i lost on my instrumental rationality point, got downvoted enough to get be restricted. on the bright side I am learning to admit i'm wrong (i was wrong to misread whether i'd offend LW, which prevented me from engaging with others on substantive points i'm trying to learn more about).

This is a response to theOtherDave -- I can't respond anymore to threads! you guys win! crush dissent based on superficial factors that "automatically result in downvotes" and thus ignore criticism! fool proof!

Is that [understanding reality] the goal? I'm not sure it is As above, I neither agree that understanding reality is a singularly important terminal goal, nor that finding the "best theory" for achieving my goals is a particularly high-priority instrumental goal.

ok, sorry to put words in your mouth -- what is your goal then? Is it not fair to say the goal is "understand reality" and "achieve your goals"? I'm ignoring the second because its personal -- the first goes to a normative understanding of reality, which presumably equally apply to each of us.

perhaps your definition is different, but my understanding is that epistemic rationality is focused on understanding reality, and it uses rational choice theory as a means to understand that reality.

On the distant chance that you're actually attempting to be reasonable and are just messing it up, I downvoted this post because I automatically downvote everything that tries to Poison the Well against being downvoted. Being preemptively accused of confirmation bias is itself sufficient reason to downvote.

If by "Rationality, as a universal theory (or near-universal) on decision making" you mean using Bayes' Theorem as a way of determining the likelihood of various potential events and consequently estimating the expected value of various courses of action, which is something that "rationality" sometimes gets used to mean on this site, I'd say (as many have said before me) that one big weakness is the lack of reliable priors. A mechanism for precisely calculating how much I should update P(x) from an existing made-up value based on things I don't necessarily know doesn't provide me with much guidance in my day-to-day life. Another big weakness is computational intractability.

If you mean more broadly making decisions based on the estimated expected value of various courses of action, I suppose the biggest weakness is again computational intractability. Which in turn potentially leads to sloppiness like making simplifying assumptions that are so radically at odds with my real environment that my estimates of value are just completely wrong.

If you mean something else, it might be useful if you said what you mean more precisely.

It's worth noting explicitly that these weaknesses are not themselves legitimate grounds for choosing some other approach that shares the same weaknesses. For example, simply making shit up typically results in estimates of value which are even more wrong. But you explicitly asked about weaknesses in isolation, rather than reasons to pick one decision theory over another.

How has Rationality, as a universal theory (or near-universal) on decision making, confronted its most painful weaknesses? What are rationality's weak points? The more broad a theory is claimed to be, the more important it seems to really test the theory's weaknesses -- that is why I assume you bring up religion, but the same standard should apply to rationality. This is not a cute question from a religious person, more of an intellectual inquiry from a person hoping to learn. In honor of the grand-daddy of cognitive biases, confirmation bias, doesn't rational choice theory need to be vetted?

HungryTurtle makes an attempt to get to this question, but he gets too far into the weeds -- this allowed LW to simply compare the "cons" of religion with the "cons" of rationality -- this is a silly inquiry -- I don't care how the weaknesses of rationality compares to the weaknesses of Judaism because rational theory, if universally applicable with no weaknesses, should be tested on the basis of that claim alone, and not its weaknesses relative to some other theory.

Please note that negative points to this post, or failure to respond will only provide further evidence that LW is guilty of confirmation bias. Its sweet when you get to use cognitive biases against those that try to weed them out. (Yes, I'm trying to goad someone into answering, but only because I really want to know your answer, not because I'm trying to troll).

I'm happy to agree that emotion hacking is important to epistemic rationality.

I agree that this is problematic but don't see what it has to do with what I've been saying.

I worry that rationality, to the extent it must value subjective considerations, tends to minimize the importance of those considerations to yield a more clear inquiry.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

isn't this the ONLY kind of emotion-hacking out there? what emotions are expressed irrespective of external stimuli? seems like a small or insignificant subset.

Let me make some more precise definitions: by "emotional responses to my thoughts" I mean "what I feel when I think a given thought," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when I think about calling people. By "emotional responses to my behavior" I mean "what I feel when I perform a given action," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when I call people. By "emotional responses to external stimuli" I mean "what I feel when a given thing happens in the world around me," e.g. I feel a mild negative emotion when people call me. The distinction I'm trying to make between my behavior and external stimuli is analogous to the distinction between operant and classical conditioning.

I thought you were questioning the value of considering/responding to others' thoughts, because you are arguing that even if you could, you would need to rely on their words and expressions, which may not be correlated with their "true" state of mind.

No, I'm just making the point that for the purposes of classifying different kinds of emotion-hacking I don't find it useful to have a category for other people's thoughts separate from other people's behaviors (in contrast to how I find it useful to have a category for my thoughts separate from my behaviors), and the reason is that I don't have direct access to other people's thoughts.

Interestingly, the "problem" you have

What problem?

I don't understand what point you're trying to make.