This seems largely correct, so long as by “rationality”, you mean the social movement. The sort of stuff taught on this website, within the context of human society and psychology. Human rationality would not apply to aliens or arbitrary AI’s.
Some people use the word “rationality” to refer to the abstract logical structure of expected utility maximization, baysian updating, ect, as exemplified by AIXI, mathematical rationality does not have anything to do with humans in particular.
Your post is quite good at describing the usefulness of human rationality. Although I would say it was more useful in research. Without being good at spotting wrong Ideas, you can make a mistake on the first line, and produce a Lot of nonsense. (See most branches of philosophy, and all theology)
Depends what type of research. If you’re doing experimental cell biology, it’s less likely that your research will be ruined by abstract philosophical assumptions which can’t be overcome by looking at the data.
Philosophic assumptions about what it means for a gene to have a given function aren’t trivial. It’s quite easy to fall victim to think about genes as platonic concepts that have an inherent function in a way that macro-phenomena don’t have in our world.
If you are dealing with complex system it’s quite easy to get mislead by bad philosophic assumptions.
In bioinformatics philosophers like Barry Smith made very important contributions to think better about ontology.
Apart from ontology epistomology is also hard. A lot of experimental cell biology papers don’t replicate. Thinking well about epistomology would allow the field to reduce the amount of papers that draw wrong conclusion from the data.
Distinguishing correlation from causation requires reasoning about the underlying reality and it’s easy to get wrong.
That actually seems false to me. My current model is that cell biology is more bottlenecked on good philosophical assumptions than empirical data. Just flagging disagreement, not necessary to hash this out.
This seems largely correct, so long as by “rationality”, you mean the social movement. The sort of stuff taught on this website, within the context of human society and psychology. Human rationality would not apply to aliens or arbitrary AI’s.
Some people use the word “rationality” to refer to the abstract logical structure of expected utility maximization, baysian updating, ect, as exemplified by AIXI, mathematical rationality does not have anything to do with humans in particular.
Your post is quite good at describing the usefulness of human rationality. Although I would say it was more useful in research. Without being good at spotting wrong Ideas, you can make a mistake on the first line, and produce a Lot of nonsense. (See most branches of philosophy, and all theology)
Depends what type of research. If you’re doing experimental cell biology, it’s less likely that your research will be ruined by abstract philosophical assumptions which can’t be overcome by looking at the data.
Philosophic assumptions about what it means for a gene to have a given function aren’t trivial. It’s quite easy to fall victim to think about genes as platonic concepts that have an inherent function in a way that macro-phenomena don’t have in our world.
If you are dealing with complex system it’s quite easy to get mislead by bad philosophic assumptions.
In bioinformatics philosophers like Barry Smith made very important contributions to think better about ontology.
Apart from ontology epistomology is also hard. A lot of experimental cell biology papers don’t replicate. Thinking well about epistomology would allow the field to reduce the amount of papers that draw wrong conclusion from the data.
Distinguishing correlation from causation requires reasoning about the underlying reality and it’s easy to get wrong.
That actually seems false to me. My current model is that cell biology is more bottlenecked on good philosophical assumptions than empirical data. Just flagging disagreement, not necessary to hash this out.