FYI, the way I define “instrumental rationality”, which I think is “specific enough to be useful” without being so specific as to be overly constraining, is:
“The study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to make better decisions.”
And for epistemic rationality, “the study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to have beliefs that more accurately reflect reality.”
In both cases, I think it’s actually plausible that the OP has some bearing. [Although, disclaimer that I’m not 100% sure I grok the OP, and might be talking about something subtly different].
I think it’s a crucial rationalist skill to be able to apply “thinking” of the sort the OP is gesturing at avoiding. But, it seems quite important to me that there’s types of ideas and literal truths that are harder to grasp if you’re only capable of thinking in a highly analytical way.
One lens to look at this through: You need to both babble and prune in order to find useful things to say, and generating good babble can involve a lot of cognitive work that looks superficially irrational. This is fine, although you will eventually want to make sure the babble can pass through some kind of pruning filter.
example 1: drawing connections between things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to notice, even if reason you drew those connections didn’t make much sense. I.e you happened to be staring at a tree and it pointed you towards a tree metaphor
example 2: if you’re highly engaging your prune module to check if things make sense, you may be overly committing to a given ontology that isn’t actually quite right. Or your S1 might be picking up on things that are important that you can’t fully articulate, and you’re tempted to throw that information out completely rather than stew on it until you have a better idea of what’s going on.
This isn’t an argument for “vibing” in particular being useful, but it’s a more general argument that even epistemic rationality often requires you to be operate in modes that seem superficially “a-rational”, to give you access to more ideas and information.
Elsethread I used the “music” as an example of something that requires good vibes in order to execute well, and I think there are kinds intellectual creativity that are more in the genre-of-rationality (i.e. puzzle solving) that may also benefit more from being in a playful mode, although I’m less confident about the details of this.
FYI, the way I define “instrumental rationality”, which I think is “specific enough to be useful” without being so specific as to be overly constraining, is:
“The study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to make better decisions.”
And for epistemic rationality, “the study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to have beliefs that more accurately reflect reality.”
In both cases, I think it’s actually plausible that the OP has some bearing. [Although, disclaimer that I’m not 100% sure I grok the OP, and might be talking about something subtly different].
I think it’s a crucial rationalist skill to be able to apply “thinking” of the sort the OP is gesturing at avoiding. But, it seems quite important to me that there’s types of ideas and literal truths that are harder to grasp if you’re only capable of thinking in a highly analytical way.
One lens to look at this through: You need to both babble and prune in order to find useful things to say, and generating good babble can involve a lot of cognitive work that looks superficially irrational. This is fine, although you will eventually want to make sure the babble can pass through some kind of pruning filter.
example 1: drawing connections between things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to notice, even if reason you drew those connections didn’t make much sense. I.e you happened to be staring at a tree and it pointed you towards a tree metaphor
example 2: if you’re highly engaging your prune module to check if things make sense, you may be overly committing to a given ontology that isn’t actually quite right. Or your S1 might be picking up on things that are important that you can’t fully articulate, and you’re tempted to throw that information out completely rather than stew on it until you have a better idea of what’s going on.
This isn’t an argument for “vibing” in particular being useful, but it’s a more general argument that even epistemic rationality often requires you to be operate in modes that seem superficially “a-rational”, to give you access to more ideas and information.
Elsethread I used the “music” as an example of something that requires good vibes in order to execute well, and I think there are kinds intellectual creativity that are more in the genre-of-rationality (i.e. puzzle solving) that may also benefit more from being in a playful mode, although I’m less confident about the details of this.