I think this line of thinking is very important. People would benefit immensely from becoming better at deciding what questions to address with their scarce cognitive resources. However, I do not think this problem of “meta-rationality” is an easy one, and in particular I’m not sure your heuristic is a good one. The principle that a good question has a clear-cut policy implication conflicts directly with the principle of curiosity. Maybe if an individual is an high-stress, high-stakes decision-making role, he or she may want to ignore questions that are not immediately relevant to the problems at hand. But the whole idea of academia is that society benefits when some individuals have the time and the incentive to go out and answer questions of academic interest—because, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know and some ideas, or their consequences, may have nonobvious policy implications somewhere down the road.
I propose the following heuristics, noting that in this area one should adopt a “fox-like” strategy and try to apply as many different perspectives as possible:
Does this question have a definitive answer? Will I know I have the right answer when I find it?
It is a good sign here if the answer is “yes”. Mathematics as a field is worthwhile, in large part, because mathematicians know with a very high degree of confidence when they have produced a correct result (in contrast, say, to medical science).
Is this question in a reference class with other questions that led to important or significant answers?
For example, in the field of AI one of the most standard strategies is to try to take a key insight from some other domain of knowledge—economics, physics, evolution, etc—and try to apply it to the problem of intelligence (a famous immunologist, Gerald Edelman, has made significant efforts to apply his insights from immunology to the problem of consciousness; in computer vision there is a very well known paper about edge detection that is very clearly inspired by the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics). I personally believe that questions in this reference class don’t typically yield much progress, but YMMV.
Is the mental algorithm I ran to conclude that this question is important vulnerable to “meta-bias”, i.e., from meta-level analogues to known cognitive biases? For example, did I falsely conclude that this question is important because of group pressure and conformity effects?
I was hoping that starting with examples involving politics would make it clear that I wasn’t suggesting we toss out intellectual curiosity, but I can make an edit clarifying this.
Why shouldn’t the same exception apply to political questions?
From an outside view this almost seems like “asking questions in my field is satisfying curiosity, asking questions outside my field is privileging the question”.
There is a large extent to which those questions are about values and not facts. But I am extremely curious about e.g. How and when does prohibition succeed in controlling the usage of a good? How are social institutions like marriage affected by how society understands them and what sort of negative externalities might there be from reforming long standing social rules? Marriage rates have dropped off a cliff among certain demographics and it seems plausible that a) that leads to really bad things and b) the cause might have had something to do with the rhetoric about marriage used by important figures in politics and academia. I’m not sure that necessarily involves the gay marriage question or that it implies a particular answer to the gay marriage question. But both issues exist at intersections of very interesting economic and socio-cultural questions such that I generally enjoy broad, thoughtful and knowledgeable discussions of those political issues.
I think this line of thinking is very important. People would benefit immensely from becoming better at deciding what questions to address with their scarce cognitive resources. However, I do not think this problem of “meta-rationality” is an easy one, and in particular I’m not sure your heuristic is a good one. The principle that a good question has a clear-cut policy implication conflicts directly with the principle of curiosity. Maybe if an individual is an high-stress, high-stakes decision-making role, he or she may want to ignore questions that are not immediately relevant to the problems at hand. But the whole idea of academia is that society benefits when some individuals have the time and the incentive to go out and answer questions of academic interest—because, of course, we don’t know what we don’t know and some ideas, or their consequences, may have nonobvious policy implications somewhere down the road.
I propose the following heuristics, noting that in this area one should adopt a “fox-like” strategy and try to apply as many different perspectives as possible:
It is a good sign here if the answer is “yes”. Mathematics as a field is worthwhile, in large part, because mathematicians know with a very high degree of confidence when they have produced a correct result (in contrast, say, to medical science).
For example, in the field of AI one of the most standard strategies is to try to take a key insight from some other domain of knowledge—economics, physics, evolution, etc—and try to apply it to the problem of intelligence (a famous immunologist, Gerald Edelman, has made significant efforts to apply his insights from immunology to the problem of consciousness; in computer vision there is a very well known paper about edge detection that is very clearly inspired by the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics). I personally believe that questions in this reference class don’t typically yield much progress, but YMMV.
I was hoping that starting with examples involving politics would make it clear that I wasn’t suggesting we toss out intellectual curiosity, but I can make an edit clarifying this.
Why shouldn’t the same exception apply to political questions?
From an outside view this almost seems like “asking questions in my field is satisfying curiosity, asking questions outside my field is privileging the question”.
Are people intellectually curious about political questions like gay marriage and gun control? That isn’t my impression.
There is a large extent to which those questions are about values and not facts. But I am extremely curious about e.g. How and when does prohibition succeed in controlling the usage of a good? How are social institutions like marriage affected by how society understands them and what sort of negative externalities might there be from reforming long standing social rules? Marriage rates have dropped off a cliff among certain demographics and it seems plausible that a) that leads to really bad things and b) the cause might have had something to do with the rhetoric about marriage used by important figures in politics and academia. I’m not sure that necessarily involves the gay marriage question or that it implies a particular answer to the gay marriage question. But both issues exist at intersections of very interesting economic and socio-cultural questions such that I generally enjoy broad, thoughtful and knowledgeable discussions of those political issues.
Sure, so discuss those general questions and not the specific ones (which are not only privileged but which many people are mind-killed over).