I think we should be very careful about collapsing rationality into one dimension. Similar to Tolstoy’s thought that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, we know there is only one way to be rational, but there are lots of ways to be irrational.
You could imagine rationalists being arranged on a pyramid. Omega is at the pinnacle, and it fans out as you go lower. I would bet knowing your horizontal position is much more important than knowing your vertical position.
Even then, this ignores possible non-monotonicities in rationality. Being half a rationalist can make you worse off because you know how to explain away the opinions of others without relinquishing your own.
And how could we classify Robert Aumann? He has produced awesome work, but makes what most of us would call a low-level mistake. I agree work needs to be done to make our community more accessible, but I don’t think we can gain much through simple classification.
I think we should be very careful about collapsing rationality into one dimension. Similar to Tolstoy’s thought that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, we know there is only one way to be rational, but there are lots of ways to be irrational.
You could imagine rationalists being arranged on a pyramid. Omega is at the pinnacle, and it fans out as you go lower. I would bet knowing your horizontal position is much more important than knowing your vertical position.
Even then, this ignores possible non-monotonicities in rationality. Being half a rationalist can make you worse off because you know how to explain away the opinions of others without relinquishing your own.
And how could we classify Robert Aumann? He has produced awesome work, but makes what most of us would call a low-level mistake. I agree work needs to be done to make our community more accessible, but I don’t think we can gain much through simple classification.