TL;DR: Instrumental rationality leads us all to at least a few false beliefs, via rational irrationality. (That is, it is instrumentally rational to believe lies if there are social rewards.) In this case, reading the Sequences is only treating the symptoms, since our biases all stem from bad incentives. The most promising solution is to build communities which actively celebrate epistemic rationality, since that aligns social incentives with accurate beliefs and methods of acquiring them.
I highly recommend this. I’ve read the sequences and thought a lot about rationalization and the like, but somehow I never made the full connection between that and instrumental rationality.
My only real complaint is with word choice, rather than substance. It’s difficult to think of one’s self as a crony, so coining “crony beliefs” may have been a suboptimal way of helping us recognize certain beliefs as crony beliefs, let alone call them that openly. Maybe we can fight this by making it a community norm to use the term for any belief which we benefit from holding. It would also have been nice to see rational irrationality name-dropped, although the author did a much better job than the sequences at leaving breadcrumbs to investigate the sources of these ideas.
TL;DR: Instrumental rationality leads us all to at least a few false beliefs, via rational irrationality. (That is, it is instrumentally rational to believe lies if there are social rewards.) In this case, reading the Sequences is only treating the symptoms, since our biases all stem from bad incentives. The most promising solution is to build communities which actively celebrate epistemic rationality, since that aligns social incentives with accurate beliefs and methods of acquiring them.
I highly recommend this. I’ve read the sequences and thought a lot about rationalization and the like, but somehow I never made the full connection between that and instrumental rationality.
My only real complaint is with word choice, rather than substance. It’s difficult to think of one’s self as a crony, so coining “crony beliefs” may have been a suboptimal way of helping us recognize certain beliefs as crony beliefs, let alone call them that openly. Maybe we can fight this by making it a community norm to use the term for any belief which we benefit from holding. It would also have been nice to see rational irrationality name-dropped, although the author did a much better job than the sequences at leaving breadcrumbs to investigate the sources of these ideas.