The best advice is tailored to individuals, and the best explanations are targeted at avoiding or uninstalling specific confusions, instead of just pointing at the concept. But here I think the right call is giving evidence for ‘a’ reader instead of TurnTrout. So, a general case for rationality:
First, by rationality I mean a focus on cognitive process rather than a specific body of conclusions or thoughts. The Way is the art that pursues a goal, not my best guess at how to achieve that goal.
Why care about cognitive process? A few factors come to mind:
2) Studying the creation of tools lets you know what tool to use when. Rather than reflexively bouncing from moment to moment, you can be deliberately doing things that you expect to help.
3) As a special case of 2, sometimes, it’s important to get things right on the first try. This means we can’t rely on processes that require lots of samples (like empiricism) and have to instead figure out what’s going on in a way that lets us do the right thing, which often also involves figuring out what sorts of cognitive work would validly give us that hope.
4) Process benefits tend to accumulate. If I expend effort and acquire food for myself today, I will be in approximately the same position tomorrow; if I expend effort and establish a system that provides me with food, I will be in a different, hopefully better position tomorrow.
Who shouldn’t care about rationality? First, for any task where the correct strategy to employ is either ‘obvious’ or ‘unintuitive but known to a tradition’, then the benefits of thinking it through yourself are much lower. Second, to the extent that most rationality techniques that we know route through “think about it,” the more expensive thinking is, the less useful the rationality techniques become.
The best advice is tailored to individuals, and the best explanations are targeted at avoiding or uninstalling specific confusions, instead of just pointing at the concept. But here I think the right call is giving evidence for ‘a’ reader instead of TurnTrout. So, a general case for rationality:
First, by rationality I mean a focus on cognitive process rather than a specific body of conclusions or thoughts. The Way is the art that pursues a goal, not my best guess at how to achieve that goal.
Why care about cognitive process? A few factors come to mind:
1) You’re stuck doing cognition, and you might want to do it better. Using your process to focus on your process can actually stabilize and improve things; see Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom and The Lens that Sees Its Own Flaws.
2) Studying the creation of tools lets you know what tool to use when. Rather than reflexively bouncing from moment to moment, you can be deliberately doing things that you expect to help.
3) As a special case of 2, sometimes, it’s important to get things right on the first try. This means we can’t rely on processes that require lots of samples (like empiricism) and have to instead figure out what’s going on in a way that lets us do the right thing, which often also involves figuring out what sorts of cognitive work would validly give us that hope.
4) Process benefits tend to accumulate. If I expend effort and acquire food for myself today, I will be in approximately the same position tomorrow; if I expend effort and establish a system that provides me with food, I will be in a different, hopefully better position tomorrow.
Who shouldn’t care about rationality? First, for any task where the correct strategy to employ is either ‘obvious’ or ‘unintuitive but known to a tradition’, then the benefits of thinking it through yourself are much lower. Second, to the extent that most rationality techniques that we know route through “think about it,” the more expensive thinking is, the less useful the rationality techniques become.