How do you notice when you're rationalizing? Like, what *actually* tips you off, in real life?
I've listed my cues below; please add your own (one idea per comment), and upvote the comments that you either: (a) use; or (b) will now try using.
I'll be using this list in a trial rationality seminar on Wednesday; it also sounds useful in general.
I don't normally downvote your contributions (and indeed had just upvoted one), but I downvoted this one for whining about downvotes. (Especially as its parent is actually at +13 right now -- maybe it was at -3 or something when you originally wrote the above, though.)
Anyone who categorically or near-categorically downvotes your contributions is unlikely to be swayed by a polite request for them not to do so.
Of course, but in this case it seemed deontologically necessary to request it anyway; I would feel guilty if I didn't even make a token effort to keep people from being needlessly self-defeating. This happens to me all the time: "if it's normally distributed then you should just straightforwardly optimize for the median outcome" versus "a heavy-tailed distribution is more accurate or at least acts ... (read more)