“It’s rational to vote for Party X” deflates to “It’s optimal to vote for Party X” or just “I think you should vote for Party X”.
I’m starting to get very confused about what Eliezer means by “deflates to”. I thought he meant “has the same meaning as” or “conveys the same meaning as”, but now I think maybe he means “most of the time when you want to use the former, you should use the latter instead”. Sorry if I’m still stuck on the by-now-not-quite-central topic of semantics, but I don’t see how “rational” has the same meaning as “should”, either according to my own understanding, or according to definitions given by Eliezer in the past. (My understanding is that “should” conveys some hard-to-define sense of normativity, whereas “rationality” is a subset of normativity that seems more objective than the other parts, which we usually call “morality”.)
FWIW, I understood “X deflates to Y” in this context to mean something like “most of the time when people say X, their beliefs about the world are such that if their goal was to express those beliefs maximally accurately they should instead say Y.”
I also expect that Eliezer would say that the bundle of computation to which “should” properly refers includes but is not limited to what “rational” refers to, but I don’t think that’s relevant to what we’re looking at here.
I had in mind, “I think you were really trying to say X” which is closer to your second meaning, not “This means X under all possible circumstances even when actually used correctly”.
“most of the time when you want to use the former, you should use the latter instead”
I think, in general, these statements amount to the same thing. “It’s rational to __” generally means the same thing as the “deflated” statement; the key difference is its use of the word “rational” or “rationality” that ends up weakening the term.
I’m starting to get very confused about what Eliezer means by “deflates to”. I thought he meant “has the same meaning as” or “conveys the same meaning as”, but now I think maybe he means “most of the time when you want to use the former, you should use the latter instead”. Sorry if I’m still stuck on the by-now-not-quite-central topic of semantics, but I don’t see how “rational” has the same meaning as “should”, either according to my own understanding, or according to definitions given by Eliezer in the past. (My understanding is that “should” conveys some hard-to-define sense of normativity, whereas “rationality” is a subset of normativity that seems more objective than the other parts, which we usually call “morality”.)
FWIW, I understood “X deflates to Y” in this context to mean something like “most of the time when people say X, their beliefs about the world are such that if their goal was to express those beliefs maximally accurately they should instead say Y.”
I also expect that Eliezer would say that the bundle of computation to which “should” properly refers includes but is not limited to what “rational” refers to, but I don’t think that’s relevant to what we’re looking at here.
I had in mind, “I think you were really trying to say X” which is closer to your second meaning, not “This means X under all possible circumstances even when actually used correctly”.
I think, in general, these statements amount to the same thing. “It’s rational to __” generally means the same thing as the “deflated” statement; the key difference is its use of the word “rational” or “rationality” that ends up weakening the term.