In a recent comment, I approvingly cited a pair of cookbooks (Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Bible and Dessert Bible), and said that—
For anyone who likes to cook or wants to learn, I think these two cookbooks can advance your grasp, not only of cooking, but of rationality as well.
This might’ve seemed to some folks to be a strange thing to say; what has cooking (or baking) to do with rationality (any more than any other activity)? In answer to that potential question, here’s a list of some of the rationality-related concepts that appear in this post (in addition to the central concept—the question of public epistemology—which the post is explicitly about):
The necessity of domain knowledge (a.k.a. “expert knowledge” or “background knowledge”) for reasoning about some domain or topic
The difficulty of converting qualitative information into quantitative information
The indispensability of learning by doing vs. the benefit of transmissible instruction
Chesterton’s fences, and when it is ok to knock them down
In a recent comment, I approvingly cited a pair of cookbooks (Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Bible and Dessert Bible), and said that—
This might’ve seemed to some folks to be a strange thing to say; what has cooking (or baking) to do with rationality (any more than any other activity)? In answer to that potential question, here’s a list of some of the rationality-related concepts that appear in this post (in addition to the central concept—the question of public epistemology—which the post is explicitly about):
The necessity of domain knowledge (a.k.a. “expert knowledge” or “background knowledge”) for reasoning about some domain or topic
The difficulty of converting qualitative information into quantitative information
The indispensability of learning by doing vs. the benefit of transmissible instruction
Chesterton’s fences, and when it is ok to knock them down
Different types of optimality criteria
Are there others I missed?