(It’s also not the sort of idea we’re looking for, because we want Big Ideas about psychology to help us bypass any need to understand individual human beings and their tortured histories, or even look at what their current programming is. Unfortunately, this is like expecting a Theory of Computing to let us equally predict obscure problems in Vista and OS X, without ever looking at their source code or development history of either one.)
So do you think e.g. overcoming akrasia necessitates understanding your self-programming via a set of decent algorithms for doing so (e.g. what Less Wrong is for epistemic rationality) that allow you to figure out for yourself whatever problems you may have? That would be a little worrying insofar as something like akrasia might be similar to a blue screen of death in your Theory of Computing example: a common failure mode resulting from any number of different problems that can only be resolved by the application of high-level learned algorithms that most people simply don’t have and never bother to find, and those who do find are unable to succinctly express in such a way as to be memetically fit.
On top of that, similar to how most people never notice that they’re horrible epistemic rationalists and that there is a higher standard to which they could aspire, most good epistemic rationalists themselves may at least notice that they’re sub-par along many dimensions of instrumental rationality and yet completely fail to be motivated to do anything about it: they pride themselves on being correct, not being successful, in the same way most people pride themselves on their success and not their correctness (by gerrymandering their definition of correctness to be success like rationalists may gerrymander their definition of success to be correctness, resulting in both of them losing by either succeeding at the wrong things or failing to succeed at the right things).
So do you think e.g. overcoming akrasia necessitates understanding your self-programming via a set of decent algorithms for doing so (e.g. what Less Wrong is for epistemic rationality) that allow you to figure out for yourself whatever problems you may have?
Btw, it would be more accurate to speak of “akrasias” as individual occurrences, rather than “akrasia” as a non-countable. One can overcome an akrasia, but not “akrasia” in some general sense.
they pride themselves on being correct, not being successful
Yep, major failure mode. Been there, done that. ;-)
Btw, it would be more accurate to speak of “akrasias” as individual occurrences, rather than “akrasia” as a non-countable. One can overcome an akrasia, but not “akrasia” in some general sense.
I bet you think the war on terror is a badly framed concept.
So do you think e.g. overcoming akrasia necessitates understanding your self-programming via a set of decent algorithms for doing so (e.g. what Less Wrong is for epistemic rationality) that allow you to figure out for yourself whatever problems you may have? That would be a little worrying insofar as something like akrasia might be similar to a blue screen of death in your Theory of Computing example: a common failure mode resulting from any number of different problems that can only be resolved by the application of high-level learned algorithms that most people simply don’t have and never bother to find, and those who do find are unable to succinctly express in such a way as to be memetically fit.
On top of that, similar to how most people never notice that they’re horrible epistemic rationalists and that there is a higher standard to which they could aspire, most good epistemic rationalists themselves may at least notice that they’re sub-par along many dimensions of instrumental rationality and yet completely fail to be motivated to do anything about it: they pride themselves on being correct, not being successful, in the same way most people pride themselves on their success and not their correctness (by gerrymandering their definition of correctness to be success like rationalists may gerrymander their definition of success to be correctness, resulting in both of them losing by either succeeding at the wrong things or failing to succeed at the right things).
Yes; see here for why.
Btw, it would be more accurate to speak of “akrasias” as individual occurrences, rather than “akrasia” as a non-countable. One can overcome an akrasia, but not “akrasia” in some general sense.
Yep, major failure mode. Been there, done that. ;-)
I bet you think the war on terror is a badly framed concept.