This posted reminded me of Eliezer’s take against toolbox style thinking. In particular, it reminded me of the tension within the rationality community between folks who see rationality has the one thing you need for everything and folks who see it as an instrumentally useful thing to pull out in some circumstances.
The former folks form what we call the Core Rationalists. Rationality might not be literally everything, but it’s the main thing, and they take an expansive view on the practice of rationality. If something helps them win, they see it as being part of rationality definitionally because it helps them win. This is also where the not-so-straw Vulcan LARPers hang out.
The latter group we might call the Instrumental Rationalists. They care about rationality to the extent it’s useful. This includes lots of normal folks who got interested in rationality because it seemed like a useful tool but it’s not really central to their identity the way it is for Core Rationalists. This is also the group where the Post/Meta-Rationalists hang out, who can think of as Core Rationalists who realized they should treat rationality as one of many tools and seek to combine it with other things to have a bigger toolbox to use to help them win.
Disagreements between these two groups show up all the time. They often play out in the comments sections of the forum when someone posts something that really gets at the heart of what rationality is. I’m thinking about posts from @[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien, comments from @Said Achmiz, whatever @Zack_M_Davis’s latest thing is, and of course some of my own posts and comments.
Perhaps this disagreement will persist because there’s not really a resolution to it. The difference between these groups is not object level rationality, but how to relate rationality. And both of these groups can be part of the rationality movement even if they sometimes piss each other off because they at least agree on one thing: rationality is really useful.
A few thoughts on this.
This posted reminded me of Eliezer’s take against toolbox style thinking. In particular, it reminded me of the tension within the rationality community between folks who see rationality has the one thing you need for everything and folks who see it as an instrumentally useful thing to pull out in some circumstances.
The former folks form what we call the Core Rationalists. Rationality might not be literally everything, but it’s the main thing, and they take an expansive view on the practice of rationality. If something helps them win, they see it as being part of rationality definitionally because it helps them win. This is also where the not-so-straw Vulcan LARPers hang out.
The latter group we might call the Instrumental Rationalists. They care about rationality to the extent it’s useful. This includes lots of normal folks who got interested in rationality because it seemed like a useful tool but it’s not really central to their identity the way it is for Core Rationalists. This is also the group where the Post/Meta-Rationalists hang out, who can think of as Core Rationalists who realized they should treat rationality as one of many tools and seek to combine it with other things to have a bigger toolbox to use to help them win.
Disagreements between these two groups show up all the time. They often play out in the comments sections of the forum when someone posts something that really gets at the heart of what rationality is. I’m thinking about posts from @[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien, comments from @Said Achmiz, whatever @Zack_M_Davis’s latest thing is, and of course some of my own posts and comments.
Perhaps this disagreement will persist because there’s not really a resolution to it. The difference between these groups is not object level rationality, but how to relate rationality. And both of these groups can be part of the rationality movement even if they sometimes piss each other off because they at least agree on one thing: rationality is really useful.