RSS

Valley of Bad Rationality

TagLast edit: 13 Nov 2021 6:54 UTC by Multicore

Then I finally reply that my experience so far—even in this realm of merely human possibility—does seem to indicate that, once you sort yourself out a bit and you aren’t doing quite so many other things wrong, striving for more rationality actually will make you better off. The long road leads out of the valley and higher than before, even in the human lands.

Incremental Progress and the Valley

It has been observed that when someone is just starting to learn rationality, they sometimes appear to be worse off than they were before. Someone else may then allege that after this person learns even more about rationality, they will finally be better off than they were before they started. The period before this improvement is known as “the valley of bad rationality”.

Non-post example:

See also

Know­ing About Bi­ases Can Hurt People

Eliezer Yudkowsky4 Apr 2007 18:01 UTC
194 points
82 comments2 min readLW link

In­cre­men­tal Progress and the Valley

Eliezer Yudkowsky4 Apr 2009 16:42 UTC
92 points
113 comments6 min readLW link

Rea­son as memetic im­mune disorder

PhilGoetz19 Sep 2009 21:05 UTC
474 points
184 comments5 min readLW link

Mak­ing your ex­plicit rea­son­ing trust­wor­thy

AnnaSalamon29 Oct 2010 0:00 UTC
119 points
95 comments6 min readLW link

“No ev­i­dence” as a Valley of Bad Rationality

Adam Zerner28 Mar 2020 23:45 UTC
106 points
21 comments2 min readLW link1 review

My ex­pe­rience with the “ra­tio­nal­ist un­canny valley”

Thomas Kwa23 Apr 2020 20:27 UTC
66 points
18 comments5 min readLW link

A Pro­cess for Deal­ing with Mo­ti­vated Reasoning

Vaughn Papenhausen3 Sep 2018 3:34 UTC
15 points
7 comments3 min readLW link

On the Open­ness per­son­al­ity trait & ‘ra­tio­nal­ity’

gwern14 Oct 2011 1:07 UTC
77 points
97 comments8 min readLW link

Sun­set at Noon

Raemon21 Nov 2017 2:05 UTC
204 points
29 comments17 min readLW link

Why Don’t Ra­tion­al­ists Win?

Adam Zerner5 Sep 2015 0:57 UTC
6 points
118 comments6 min readLW link

STRUCTURE: Real­ity and ra­tio­nal best practice

Hazard1 Feb 2019 23:51 UTC
5 points
2 comments1 min readLW link

Emo­tional tools for the be­gin­ner rationalist

Gleb_Tsipursky9 Oct 2015 5:01 UTC
6 points
43 comments2 min readLW link

Prob­lem of Op­ti­mal False Information

Endovior15 Oct 2012 21:42 UTC
23 points
113 comments1 min readLW link

Bad reductionism

Adam Zerner16 Dec 2020 8:21 UTC
12 points
3 comments3 min readLW link