Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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Rationality as a tool to serve yourself. A lot of SSC and AC10 is around this idea that rational intelligent thinking with self awareness of bias allows you to model the world accurately.

As for the rest, yes, I agree with you. Often, after having considered a great deal of evidence, I condense the finding into some strength of belief about something. Now, absent the original evidence I have a position. This is usually fine since I actually lack the ability to summon all evidence on demand.

It's okay, though, since I (and I suspect most people intuitively) have both a likelihood notion and a certainty in likelihood notion analogous to a Confidence Interval and P-value, if you will.

So I might hold the belief that GME is going to be between 120 and infinity on Jan 13 2022 and have a certainty in that belief that is like 10% but lose the evidence that made me think that.

This is also sort of a failure mode for fast Aumann Agreement even in co-incentivized individuals - the fact that memory is short.

So the problem is that my certainty holding is not well done.

Thanks for the thought prompt.

I've always found it odd that the people called "rationalists" are not rationalist. Talking about evidence and realistic priors all the time is good (they don't do enough evidence gathering though) but it is not rationalism, it is empiricism.

Surely a rationalist would be into logic and actively refuse to read studies, like the Austrian economists did.

It's just a terminology thing. Sort of like how atheist actuaries still account for Acts of God.

The word 'rational' is one of the most abused in western intellectual history. Hegel considered his system 'rational' and I think it is fairly self-evident that that has nothing to do with these internet 'rationalists'.

> Rationality as a tool to serve yourself. A lot of SSC and AC10 is around this idea that rational intelligent thinking with self awareness of bias allows you to model the world accurately.

That sounds like an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence. No doubt physics and engineering have made great advances, but that doesn't mean that every social science that dresses itself up in the language of rationalism will be able to make similar advances, or really any advance at all. In fact, there is a case it will lead to regression rather than advancement:

Societies are very complex things made of people who respond to changing incentives. I don't believe anyone understands them very well, nor has any field in the social sciences established a track record of making highly accurate out of sample predictions, especially for the efficacy of interventions 10, 100, 1000 generations on. Even the simple question of "what keeps a society together?" is still a puzzling one, especially now that post-modern Western societies are disintegrating before our eyes and are failing to even biologically reproduce at replacement levels.

And so we turn to values. At least with values, it is possible to gain experimental knowledge in the laboratory of history. Societies reproduce values and compete with each other as well as with a hostile environment, so long lived societies should have acquired value systems more conducive to social survival.

And I don't think we can make much stronger claims than that.

Certainly someone just imagining stuff or doing some small experiments is unlikely to come up with robust rules for organizing society that will stand the test of time better than what comes from the long lived traditions of successful societies.

Someone living 1000 or even 100 years ago did not have the information we have.(eta: to design a society) Technology also lets us afford things that past societies simply couldn't do.

We sometime learn from evolved biology to make machines, but sometimes we can also see that evolution made a bad design. By learning from what has worked it's not too difficult to design an alternate society that will work just fine for decades or centuries.

Some societies survive by preying on others. Some are stable but prey on their own. I don't want a life in service to a society that evolved to be strong. I want a society that exists for the benefit of the people in it, and improves as we learn better ways to do things. (The current system does change but different structures could be much more adaptable.)

I should clarify. I meant "more accurately than not engaging in that pattern of thought" not "accurately". The latter is an absolute statement, the former a relative one.

And, yes, one can use alternative schools of epistemology if one believes so. This group of people derive theirs significantly from Popper's line of "critical rationalism" which is different from "empiricism" (the names here are the ones that annoyed our cousin comment over there).

This school has certain affordances that permit them to reason as they do but if you disagree the differences between us are likely so large that it is unlikely that I can explain without expending far more effort than I am willing to.

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