I believe CFAR workshops address a lot of these issues, a huge focus of them being the interplay between high-level, logically thought out cognition (system 2) and the lower level, intuitive thinking (system 1). One of the major points was that system 1 is actually very useful at providing information and making decisions, so long as you ask the question right. Smart people I think tend to under-utilise system 1, often ignoring their gut feeling when it is providing useful information.
To use your fashion example, If I consider dressing up nicely, part of me says “This is all pointless, it’s just signalling!”, and wants me to squash the little voice that is telling me that actually, I value looking nice and should just give in to that desire because there are actual upsides and no downsides!
Again, I found that the CFARian way is to provisionally accept your terminal goals and gut feelings as legitimate, and go about satisfying them rather than criticising them too much (criticising them being a job for epistemic rationality, CFAR being more about instrumental rationality)
I’m hesitant to link you to Julia Galef’s “The Straw Vulcan” talk, since everything you’re writing seems so in line with it that I suspect you’ve already seen it! But if you haven’t, it’s incredibly relevant to this topic.
Another thing I’m reminded of is the post Reason as a Memetic Disorder. Basically, sometimes there are good cultural practises that smart people fail to see the logic behind (because it’s subtle, or because it’s inconsistent with some false belief they have), and so they drop the practise, to their detriment. Less smart people keep doing it, since they’re happy to simply conform without having reasons for everything.
I believe CFAR workshops address a lot of these issues, a huge focus of them being the interplay between high-level, logically thought out cognition (system 2) and the lower level, intuitive thinking (system 1). One of the major points was that system 1 is actually very useful at providing information and making decisions, so long as you ask the question right. Smart people I think tend to under-utilise system 1, often ignoring their gut feeling when it is providing useful information.
To use your fashion example, If I consider dressing up nicely, part of me says “This is all pointless, it’s just signalling!”, and wants me to squash the little voice that is telling me that actually, I value looking nice and should just give in to that desire because there are actual upsides and no downsides!
Again, I found that the CFARian way is to provisionally accept your terminal goals and gut feelings as legitimate, and go about satisfying them rather than criticising them too much (criticising them being a job for epistemic rationality, CFAR being more about instrumental rationality)
I’m hesitant to link you to Julia Galef’s “The Straw Vulcan” talk, since everything you’re writing seems so in line with it that I suspect you’ve already seen it! But if you haven’t, it’s incredibly relevant to this topic.
Another thing I’m reminded of is the post Reason as a Memetic Disorder. Basically, sometimes there are good cultural practises that smart people fail to see the logic behind (because it’s subtle, or because it’s inconsistent with some false belief they have), and so they drop the practise, to their detriment. Less smart people keep doing it, since they’re happy to simply conform without having reasons for everything.