Just another Bay Area Singulatarian Transhumanist Libertarian Rationalist Polyamor-ish coder & math nerd. My career focuses on competitive governance; personally I’m very into personal development (“Inward & upward”); lately I’ve gotten super into cultivation novels because I want to continuously self-improve until my power has grown to where I can challenge the very heavens to protect humanity.
patrissimo
Karma: 1,683
For amateur players, sure. But there is an easily memorizable table by which to play BJ perfectly, either basic strategy or counting cards. So you always clearly know what you should do. If you are playing BJ to win, it stops being a test of rationality.
Whereas even when you become skilled at poker, it is still a constant test of rationality both because optimal strategy is complex (uncertainty about correct strategy means lots of opportunity to lie to yourself) and you want to play maximally anyway (uncertainty about whether opponent is making a mistake gives you even more chances to lie to yourself). Kinda like life...
You’re awesome, Eli. I love the mix of rationality and emotion here. Emotion is a powerful tool for motivating people. We of the Light Side are rightfully uncomfortable with its power to manipulate, but that doesn’t mean we have to abandon it completely.
I recently suggested a rationality “cult” where the group affirmation and belonging exercise is to circle up and have each person in turn say something they disagree with about the tenets of the group. Then everyone cheers and applauds, giving positive feedback. But now I see that this is going too far towards disagreement—better would be for each person to state one area of agreement and one of disagreement with the cult’s principles, or today’s sermon or exercises, and then be applauded.
I’ve tried this in the past, but now I find I can tell how I’d feel without flipping the coin. If I’m unsure about a decision, flipping the coin no longer helps—it just brings to mind what I don’t like about whichever option comes up.
I love saying crazy things that I can support, and I thrive on the attention given to the iconoclast, so I find it impossible to answer this.
The only beliefs that I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying here are beliefs that I want to be true, want to argue for, but I know would get shredded. This is one reason I try to hang out with smart, argumentative people—so that my concern about being shredded in an argument forces me to more carefully evaluate my beliefs. (With less intelligent people, I could say false things and still win arguments).
I think it’s great that people are identifying existing children’s tales that serve this purpose. Since they are already written, and in many cases out of copyright, they are the low-hanging fruit we can use to jump-start a Rationalist’s Book of Tales.
I think there is an important distinction between cheap and expensive tolerance. If I am sitting on a plane and don’t have a good book and am talking to my seatmate, and they seem stupid and irrational, being tolerant is likely to lead to an enjoyable conversation. I may even learn something.
But if I am deciding what authors to read, whose arguments to think about more seriously, etc., then it seems irrational to not judge and prioritize with my limited time.
And this relates to indirect tolerance—someone who doesn’t judge and prioritize good arguments but instead listens to and talks to everyone is someone whose links and recommendations are less valuable because they have done less filtering. On the other hand, they are more likely to convert people, and when they do find good ideas they are more likely to be good ideas I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. So it’s tricky. Seems like the ideal is to read people who are intolerant but read tolerant people, so they have the broadest base of ideas, but still select the best.
Individual Rationality Is a Matter of Life and Death
Sure, balance is important. But if you look at Robin’s closing paragraph, it is not calling for balance:
“Perhaps martial-art-style rationality makes sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins forced by humanity’s vast stunning cluelessness to single-handedly block the coming robot rampage. But for those of us who respect the opinions of enough others to want to work with them to find truth, it makes more sense to design and field institutions which give each person better incentives to update a common consensus.”
What I get from the metaphor is that practicing martial-arts style rationality is as useless to our lives as practicing physical martial arts. And that is horridly wrong.
Thanks for explaining your downvote, but don’t apologize for it!
It was the characterization of martial-art-style rationality as only making sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins that gave me the impression—do you now agree that martial-arts-style rationality is actually useful for everyone?
Perhaps I am prejudiced by poker (and games in general), but I see life as a constant series of decisions. The quality of those decisions, combined with luck, gives an outcome. Life is a game of chance and skill, in other words.
MAS rationality makes for better quality decisions, and thus makes for better outcomes. When there are institutional substitutes, I agree they can also make for better outcomes, but there are no institutional substitutes for the vast majority of the constant stream of decisions we encounter in life. I predict if you went through your day, noticed every decision you make (hundreds?), and scored them based on whether it is plausible that the decision could entirely be made via an institutional substitute, removing your own need to be rational completely, you would find almost none qualify. Those that do would be among the most important (medical decisions, how to invest your money), but some important decisions would remain (acting in an emergency situation).
Good point about the marginal value of rationality. But my experience with myself and with almost all of the smart graduate-degree holding people I know, is that there is significant irrationality left, and significant gains to be had from self-improvement. You may believe differently.
I found Piers Anthony’s novels, such as the Adept series, to be good preteen rationality books. His characters are constantly trying to figure out the world around them, describe their reasoning, make complicated (for preteen) moral decisions, and solve puzzles. I don’t think his books describe specific techniques that are useful, but they do portray “trying to figure out the world using reason” in a very positive light.
I’m tempted to say “have them play poker”, except it uses lots of domain-specific knowledge as well as general rationality. Perhaps if you could generate random games from a large enough space that people don’t build up game-specific skills, and the games just end up testing general rationality? While poker-like games don’t test all aspects of rationality, there are some things like “ability to keep making good decisions when frustrated / bored / angry” that these games test very well.
I think people would develop skill at the whole class of games...but at the same time, they would be improving their rationality.
Yes, the maintaining under stress aspect is key. This is a large part of why poker is hard—it has many characteristics which maximize stress by triggering bad primal instincts.
I like the idea of using games, but I worry that people would learn to get good at the specific games or game-space, especially if there are few of them. Specializing in a certain logic puzzle != being rational. Also there is the issue others mentioned that performance under stress is a big part of rationality.
By rationality I am not referring to bayesian reasoning. I simply mean making correct decisions even when (especially when) one’s hardwired instincts give the wrong answer.
In the first case, I should not have driven. In the second case, I should have told the driver to be more careful. In both cases, I made serious mistakes in life-or-death situations. I call that irrational, and I seek to not replicate such mistakes in the future.
You are welcome to call it “common sense” if you prefer. “Common sense” is rather a misnomer, in my opinion, considering how uncommon a quality it is. But I really don’t care what it is called. I simply mean, making better decisions, screwing up less, being less of a monkey and more of a human. I find it baffling that people don’t find it blindingly obvious that this is one of the most important skills to develop in life.
Arguably more so: the decisions made by governments, cultures and large institutions have far larger effects than any decision I’ll ever make.
And you have far less impact on them. None, in most cases. When it comes to the transformation of effort applied to impact on your life, developing individual skills has vastly more effect—by orders of magnitude, I would say.
The sizes here are so wildly different I don’t see them as really comparable. I have never in my life had to defend myself physically against serious harm. Yet I make decisions with my flawed monkey brain every minute of every day of my life! The benefit to me from improving the quality of my decisions (whatever you want to call that—martial-arts-style rationality works for me, but perhaps the term means something else to others) is orders of magnitude greater than the benefit of improving my ability to defend myself physically.
I mean, I seriously find it hard to understand how you can compare a skill that I have never used to a skill that I use every minute of my life ?!?! I agree with you that one must posit implausible scenarios for personal physical defense to be useful, but I think one must posit even less plausible scenarios for personal mental acuity to not be useful. Anyone can get mugged, but who never needs to make a tough decision affected by standard biases?
Play poker for significant amounts of money. While it only tests limited and specific areas of rationality, and of course requires some significant domain-specific knowledge, poker is an excellent rationality test. The main difficulty of playing the game well, once one understands the basic strategy, is in how amazingly well it evokes and then punishes our irrational natures. Difficulties updating (believing the improbable when new information comes in), loss aversion, takeover by the limbic system (anger / jealousy / revenge / etc), lots of aspects that it tests.