I personally define rationality as “the study of how to make robustly good decisions” (with epistemic and instrumental rationality being two arenas that you need to be skilled at for it to matter)
Some things I see rationality for are:
Performing robustly even if you situation changes. You can make a bunch of money by finding a locally good job and getting skills to do it pretty well, without relying much on rationality. But, if you are dissatisfied with the prospect that your situation might change (your job stops being lucrative, you stop being emotionally satisfied with it, you realize that you have other goals, you realize that the world might be about to end), you want rationality, so that you can figure out what other goals to pursue, and how to pursue them, and what facts about reality might help or hinder you.
Thinking about problems when it’s hard to find good evidence
Gaining a deeper understanding of thinking, well enough to contribute to the cutting edge of how to think well, which can then either be used to think about particularly-tricky problems, or distilled down into more general lessons than can be applied with less effort.
For example, I’m glad someone studied Bayes theorem well enough to distill it down into the general two heuristics of “remember base rates” and “remember relative likelihood ratios” when considering evidence. That person/people may or may not have gotten benefits for themselves commesurate with the effort they put in.
I personally define rationality as “the study of how to make robustly good decisions” (with epistemic and instrumental rationality being two arenas that you need to be skilled at for it to matter)
Some things I see rationality for are:
Performing robustly even if you situation changes. You can make a bunch of money by finding a locally good job and getting skills to do it pretty well, without relying much on rationality. But, if you are dissatisfied with the prospect that your situation might change (your job stops being lucrative, you stop being emotionally satisfied with it, you realize that you have other goals, you realize that the world might be about to end), you want rationality, so that you can figure out what other goals to pursue, and how to pursue them, and what facts about reality might help or hinder you.
Thinking about problems when it’s hard to find good evidence
Gaining a deeper understanding of thinking, well enough to contribute to the cutting edge of how to think well, which can then either be used to think about particularly-tricky problems, or distilled down into more general lessons than can be applied with less effort.
For example, I’m glad someone studied Bayes theorem well enough to distill it down into the general two heuristics of “remember base rates” and “remember relative likelihood ratios” when considering evidence. That person/people may or may not have gotten benefits for themselves commesurate with the effort they put in.
Escaping local minima by reasoning even when local evidence should keep you in it.