I observed on many occasions that it is easy to make the “right’ choice when you value the fact that you are trying to live your life in the right manner. The nice feels that you get when making the right choice compensate for the willpower expended in taking the corresponding actions.
Except that most people think they are habitually in the right, and that they are consistently making the right choices. If things don’t work out, often it’s either attributed to some evil circumstance, or to one big choice that was bad (yet probably because they were “too trusting”, turning even the bad choice into a virtue. All/most other choices were right, of course). Compounded by incompetence.
On the contrary, it’s the intricacies of rationality that open our eyes to how wrong our actions often turn out to be, or rather how woefully incomplete our information is, how inadequate our future-extrapolators. It’s not even that we can say “given everything we knew, at the time it was the right choice”. Not while learning about cognitive biases, even the most basic ones.
If you wanna have “the nice feel” that you’re consistently making the right choice, don’t study rationality.
No, no—the objective is not to have “the nice feel”, the objective is to get the nice outcome, presumably such as you get by behaving rationally. “The nice feel”, as described above, is just a thing that happens to help you, under certain circumstances.
It’s not clear to me at all that explicitly studying rationality (out of an academic interest, as insight porn, whatever) makes you more successful in achieving outcomes which give you a “nice feel”, compared to just mimicking/internalising heuristics and social cues by ways of being embedded in a subculture implementing them (probably without reflecting too much).
Studying “the art of winning”, doesn’t equal acquiring the knack to implement it, especially if the “it” turns out to be internalising all sort of hacked-together heuristics such that they become second-nature. Similar to how academically studying what makes a Roman a Roman probably makes you less of a Roman than simply growing up in a Roman household.
Consider studying acting tricks versus living as an actor, mimicking the tricks without even realizing.
Or mental discipline—you can learn all day long how important it is, just being trained to have mental endurance (without the term ever coming) as a child will outweigh all that and more.
Studying “the art of winning”, doesn’t equal acquiring the knack to implement it
If it doesn’t include it, it’s a poor sort of studying. Studying rationality “out of an academic interest, as insight porn, whatever” is not what I would call “studying”.
Except that most people think they are habitually in the right, and that they are consistently making the right choices. If things don’t work out, often it’s either attributed to some evil circumstance, or to one big choice that was bad (yet probably because they were “too trusting”, turning even the bad choice into a virtue. All/most other choices were right, of course). Compounded by incompetence.
You have here a very specific model of a failure mode a person can have with many details. Be more careful with claims about “most people”.
Except that most people think they are habitually in the right, and that they are consistently making the right choices. If things don’t work out, often it’s either attributed to some evil circumstance, or to one big choice that was bad (yet probably because they were “too trusting”, turning even the bad choice into a virtue. All/most other choices were right, of course). Compounded by incompetence.
On the contrary, it’s the intricacies of rationality that open our eyes to how wrong our actions often turn out to be, or rather how woefully incomplete our information is, how inadequate our future-extrapolators. It’s not even that we can say “given everything we knew, at the time it was the right choice”. Not while learning about cognitive biases, even the most basic ones.
If you wanna have “the nice feel” that you’re consistently making the right choice, don’t study rationality.
No, no—the objective is not to have “the nice feel”, the objective is to get the nice outcome, presumably such as you get by behaving rationally. “The nice feel”, as described above, is just a thing that happens to help you, under certain circumstances.
It’s not clear to me at all that explicitly studying rationality (out of an academic interest, as insight porn, whatever) makes you more successful in achieving outcomes which give you a “nice feel”, compared to just mimicking/internalising heuristics and social cues by ways of being embedded in a subculture implementing them (probably without reflecting too much).
Studying “the art of winning”, doesn’t equal acquiring the knack to implement it, especially if the “it” turns out to be internalising all sort of hacked-together heuristics such that they become second-nature. Similar to how academically studying what makes a Roman a Roman probably makes you less of a Roman than simply growing up in a Roman household.
Consider studying acting tricks versus living as an actor, mimicking the tricks without even realizing.
Or mental discipline—you can learn all day long how important it is, just being trained to have mental endurance (without the term ever coming) as a child will outweigh all that and more.
If it doesn’t include it, it’s a poor sort of studying. Studying rationality “out of an academic interest, as insight porn, whatever” is not what I would call “studying”.
You have here a very specific model of a failure mode a person can have with many details. Be more careful with claims about “most people”.