Looking back on this post having learned about the Free Energy Principle, I wonder if instead of saying “rationality is improving accuracy of beliefs and achieving your values”, one could instead just say “rationality is the minimization of free energy”. The free energy principle, or more specifically the theory of active inference, encodes both goals of “having good models” and “achieving your values” as simply minimizing the difference between observation and prediction, either by making the prediction more accurate through more comprehensive models, or by finding the best policy (action) upon the world that most likely to produce observations more in line with an existing model.
Looking back on this post having learned about the Free Energy Principle, I wonder if instead of saying “rationality is improving accuracy of beliefs and achieving your values”, one could instead just say “rationality is the minimization of free energy”. The free energy principle, or more specifically the theory of active inference, encodes both goals of “having good models” and “achieving your values” as simply minimizing the difference between observation and prediction, either by making the prediction more accurate through more comprehensive models, or by finding the best policy (action) upon the world that most likely to produce observations more in line with an existing model.