You won’t do that if you put the technique first by saying “I serve reason”, because that morphs in your mind into “I serve Jesuit casuistry” or whatever.
I agree with this point, but that’s exactly what Eliezer stated he was in favor of: serving something else and merely using rationality as a means toward that end while it’s convenient to do so.
It doesn’t do any good to avoid making an implicit error by explicitly making that error instead. Certainly we need to compare our thinking to a fundamental basis, but the goal we’re seeking can’t be that basis. Rationality is about always checking our thinking against reality directly, and using that to evaluate not only our methods of reaching our goals but the nature of our goals themselves.
If you adopt rationality merely because you want to use it to attain your ends, what happens if you discover that your ends aren’t compatible with it? (And if that’s really what you’re doing, how did you know to adopt rationality in the first place? Just keep trying random stuff until you happen to stumble into the correct meta-strategy by chance? I think rationality has to be the starting point, not something picked up along the way.)
I agree with this point, but that’s exactly what Eliezer stated he was in favor of: serving something else and merely using rationality as a means toward that end while it’s convenient to do so.
It doesn’t do any good to avoid making an implicit error by explicitly making that error instead. Certainly we need to compare our thinking to a fundamental basis, but the goal we’re seeking can’t be that basis. Rationality is about always checking our thinking against reality directly, and using that to evaluate not only our methods of reaching our goals but the nature of our goals themselves.
If you adopt rationality merely because you want to use it to attain your ends, what happens if you discover that your ends aren’t compatible with it? (And if that’s really what you’re doing, how did you know to adopt rationality in the first place? Just keep trying random stuff until you happen to stumble into the correct meta-strategy by chance? I think rationality has to be the starting point, not something picked up along the way.)