If I’m correct, (I’m fairly new) the institution/site’s perspective of rationality is something approximating accurate Bayesian reasoning. The name of the site, I suspect is downstream of this: “Less Wrong”. Implying one gets to truth by updating their priors with more evidence.
I may be wrong, of course, as always. But I disagree strongly with that framing. I do not think that genuine insights are gotten from being less and less wrong. Let’s call this process epistemic discovery. An epistemic discovery CAN NOT teach you. Surely what can I mean by such a statement? Your understanding and comprehension or reasoning of the world is fixed, you’re merely finding the world in which you live. It’s a discovery process, not a process towards truth.
Truth in a sense, does not merely improve our knowledge or information, but it rewires our conceptual framework entirely. Consider a deer for instance, granted copious amounts of finite time, would they ever discover or invent a gun? Can the concept even be generated within their representational architecture? There are ideas that supersede any prior reasoning frameworks. Logics that contradict, stories that don’t end, jokes that trail the macabre.
You don’t become ‘less wrong’, you simply become… different.
Hey! This isn’t germane to the topic per se, but I notice you stated you struggled with hard work. I also struggle with hard work. I’m wondering if you’ve solved the problem.