While I am sad you’ve gotten this impression of what we’re here calling meta-rationality, I also don’t have a whole lot to say to convince you otherwise. We have often been foolish when first exploring these ideas and write about them in ways that do have status implications and I think we’ve left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths over it, plus there’s an echo of the second-hand post-modernists’ tendency to view themselves as better than everyone else (although to be fair this is nothing new in intellectualism; just the most recent version of it that has a similar form).
That said, I do want to address one point you bring up because it might be a misunderstanding of the meta-rationalist position.
The important part is that you refuse to place yourself on this map; instead you insist that you are always freely choosing the appropriate point to use in given situation, this getting all the advantages and none of the disadvantages; while everyone else is just hopelessly stuck at their one point.
I’m not sure who thinks they have this degree of freedom, but the genesis of the meta-rationalist epistemology is that the map is part of the territory and is thus the map is constrained by the territory and not by an external desire for correspondence or anything else. Thus where we are in the territory greatly influences the kind of map we can draw, to the point that we cannot even hope to draw what we might call an ideal map because all maps will necessarily carry assumptions imposed by the place of observation.
This doesn’t mean that we can always choose whatever perspective to use in a given situation, but rather that we must acknowledge the non-primacy of any particular perspective (unless we impose a purpose against which to judge) and can then, from our relatively small part of the territory from which we can observe to draw our map, use information provided to us by the map to reasonably simulate how the map would look if we could view the territory from a different place and then update our map based on this implied information.
To me it seems rationalists/scientists/theologians/etc. are the ones who have the extra degree of freedom because, although from the inside they restrict themselves to a particular perspective judged on some desirable criteria, those criteria are chosen without being fully constrained, and thus between individuals there is no mechanism of consensus if their preferences disagree. But I understand that from the rationalist perspective this probably looks reversed because by taking the thing that creates different perspectives and puts it in the map a seemingly fundamental preference disagreement becomes part of the perspective.
(In some sense, this is what Eliezer also tried with his “winning” and “nameless virtue”, only to get reduced to “meh, Kegan level 4” regardless.)
I think there are plenty of things in LW rationality that point to meta-rationality, and I think that’s why we’re engaged with this community and many people have come to the meta-rationality position through LW rationality (hence even why it’s being called that among other names like post-rationality). That said, interacting with many rationalists (or if we were all being more humble what we might call aspiring rationalists) and talking to them they express having at most episteme of ideas around “winning” and “nameless virtue” and not gnosis. The (aspiring) meta-rationalists are claiming they do have gnosis here, though to be fair we’re mostly offering doxia as evidence because we’re still working on having episteme ourselves.
This need not be true of all self-identified rationalists, of course, but if we are trying to make a distinction between views people seem to hold within the rationalist discourse and “rationalist” is the self-identification term used by many people on one side the the distinction, then choosing another name for those of us who wish to identify on the other side seems reasonable. I myself now try to avoid categorization of people and instead focus on categorization of thought in the language I use to describe these ideas, although I’ve not done that here to remain anchored on the terms already in use in this discussion. I instead like to talk about people thinking in particular ways that the limits those ways of thinking have since we don’t make our thinking, so to speak, but our thinking makes us. This better reflects the way I actually think about these concepts, but unfortunately the most worked out ideas in meta-rational discourse are not evenly distributed yet.
Thank you for more bits of information that answer my original question in this thread. You have my virtual upvote :)
After reading a bit more about meta-rationality and observing how my perspective changes when I try to think this way, I’ve come to an opinion that the “disagreement on priorities”, as I have originally called it, is more significant than I originally acknowledged.
To give an example, if one adopts the science-based map (SBM) as the foundation of their thinking for most practical purposes and only checks the other maps when the SBM doesn’t work (or when modelling other people), they will see the world differently from a person who routinely tries to adopt multiple different perspectives when exploring every problem they face. Even though technically their world views are the same, the different priorities (given that both have bounded computational resources) will lead them to exploring different parts of the solution space and potentially finding different insights. The differences can accumulate through updating in different directions, so, at least in theory, their world views can drift apart to a significant degree.
… the genesis of the meta-rationalist epistemology is that the map is part of the territory and is thus the map is constrained by the territory and not by an external desire for correspondence or anything else.
Again, even though I see this idea as being part (or a trivial consequence) of LW-rationality, focusing your attention on how your map is influenced by where you are in the territory gives new insights.
So my current take aways are: as rationalists that agree with meta-rationalists on (meta-)epistemological foundations we should consider updating our epistemological priorities in the direction that they are advocating; if we can figure out ways to formulate meta-rationalist ideas in a less inscrutable way with less nebulosity, we should do so—it will benefit everyone; we should look into what meta-rationalists have to say about creativity / hypothesis generation—perhaps it will help with formulating a general high level theory of creative thinking (and if we do it in a way that’s precise enough to be programmed into computers, that would be pretty significant).
While I am sad you’ve gotten this impression of what we’re here calling meta-rationality, I also don’t have a whole lot to say to convince you otherwise. We have often been foolish when first exploring these ideas and write about them in ways that do have status implications and I think we’ve left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths over it, plus there’s an echo of the second-hand post-modernists’ tendency to view themselves as better than everyone else (although to be fair this is nothing new in intellectualism; just the most recent version of it that has a similar form).
That said, I do want to address one point you bring up because it might be a misunderstanding of the meta-rationalist position.
I’m not sure who thinks they have this degree of freedom, but the genesis of the meta-rationalist epistemology is that the map is part of the territory and is thus the map is constrained by the territory and not by an external desire for correspondence or anything else. Thus where we are in the territory greatly influences the kind of map we can draw, to the point that we cannot even hope to draw what we might call an ideal map because all maps will necessarily carry assumptions imposed by the place of observation.
This doesn’t mean that we can always choose whatever perspective to use in a given situation, but rather that we must acknowledge the non-primacy of any particular perspective (unless we impose a purpose against which to judge) and can then, from our relatively small part of the territory from which we can observe to draw our map, use information provided to us by the map to reasonably simulate how the map would look if we could view the territory from a different place and then update our map based on this implied information.
To me it seems rationalists/scientists/theologians/etc. are the ones who have the extra degree of freedom because, although from the inside they restrict themselves to a particular perspective judged on some desirable criteria, those criteria are chosen without being fully constrained, and thus between individuals there is no mechanism of consensus if their preferences disagree. But I understand that from the rationalist perspective this probably looks reversed because by taking the thing that creates different perspectives and puts it in the map a seemingly fundamental preference disagreement becomes part of the perspective.
I think there are plenty of things in LW rationality that point to meta-rationality, and I think that’s why we’re engaged with this community and many people have come to the meta-rationality position through LW rationality (hence even why it’s being called that among other names like post-rationality). That said, interacting with many rationalists (or if we were all being more humble what we might call aspiring rationalists) and talking to them they express having at most episteme of ideas around “winning” and “nameless virtue” and not gnosis. The (aspiring) meta-rationalists are claiming they do have gnosis here, though to be fair we’re mostly offering doxia as evidence because we’re still working on having episteme ourselves.
This need not be true of all self-identified rationalists, of course, but if we are trying to make a distinction between views people seem to hold within the rationalist discourse and “rationalist” is the self-identification term used by many people on one side the the distinction, then choosing another name for those of us who wish to identify on the other side seems reasonable. I myself now try to avoid categorization of people and instead focus on categorization of thought in the language I use to describe these ideas, although I’ve not done that here to remain anchored on the terms already in use in this discussion. I instead like to talk about people thinking in particular ways that the limits those ways of thinking have since we don’t make our thinking, so to speak, but our thinking makes us. This better reflects the way I actually think about these concepts, but unfortunately the most worked out ideas in meta-rational discourse are not evenly distributed yet.
Thank you for more bits of information that answer my original question in this thread. You have my virtual upvote :)
After reading a bit more about meta-rationality and observing how my perspective changes when I try to think this way, I’ve come to an opinion that the “disagreement on priorities”, as I have originally called it, is more significant than I originally acknowledged.
To give an example, if one adopts the science-based map (SBM) as the foundation of their thinking for most practical purposes and only checks the other maps when the SBM doesn’t work (or when modelling other people), they will see the world differently from a person who routinely tries to adopt multiple different perspectives when exploring every problem they face. Even though technically their world views are the same, the different priorities (given that both have bounded computational resources) will lead them to exploring different parts of the solution space and potentially finding different insights. The differences can accumulate through updating in different directions, so, at least in theory, their world views can drift apart to a significant degree.
Again, even though I see this idea as being part (or a trivial consequence) of LW-rationality, focusing your attention on how your map is influenced by where you are in the territory gives new insights.
So my current take aways are: as rationalists that agree with meta-rationalists on (meta-)epistemological foundations we should consider updating our epistemological priorities in the direction that they are advocating; if we can figure out ways to formulate meta-rationalist ideas in a less inscrutable way with less nebulosity, we should do so—it will benefit everyone; we should look into what meta-rationalists have to say about creativity / hypothesis generation—perhaps it will help with formulating a general high level theory of creative thinking (and if we do it in a way that’s precise enough to be programmed into computers, that would be pretty significant).