I just want to say that I found this comment personally helpful.
This is the problem with how the rationalist community approaches the concept of what it means to “make a rational decision” perfectly demonstrated in a single debate. You do not make a “rational decision” in the real world by reasoning in a vacuum.
Something about this seems on point to me. Rationalists, in general, are much more likely to be mathematicians, than (for instance) mechanical engineers. It does seem right to me that when I look around, I see people drawn to abstract analyses, very plausibly at the expense of neglecting contextualized details that are crucial for making good calls. This seems like it could very well be a bias of my culture.
For instance, it’s fun and popular to talk about civilizational inadequacy, or how the world is mad. I think that is pointing at something true and important, but I wonder how much of that is basically overlooking the fact that it is hard to do things in the real world with a bunch of different stakeholders and a confusing mistakes.
In a lot of cases, civilizational inadequacy can be the result of engineers (broadly construed) who understand that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, pushing projects through to completion anyway. The outcome is sometimes so muddled to be worse than having done nothing, but also, shipping things under constraints, even though they could be much better on some axes is how civilization runs.
Anyway, this makes me think that I should attempt to do more engineering projects, or otherwise find ways to operate in domains where the goal is to get “good enough”, within a bunch of not-always crisply-defined constraints.
I just want to say that I found this comment personally helpful.
Something about this seems on point to me. Rationalists, in general, are much more likely to be mathematicians, than (for instance) mechanical engineers. It does seem right to me that when I look around, I see people drawn to abstract analyses, very plausibly at the expense of neglecting contextualized details that are crucial for making good calls. This seems like it could very well be a bias of my culture.
For instance, it’s fun and popular to talk about civilizational inadequacy, or how the world is mad. I think that is pointing at something true and important, but I wonder how much of that is basically overlooking the fact that it is hard to do things in the real world with a bunch of different stakeholders and a confusing mistakes.
In a lot of cases, civilizational inadequacy can be the result of engineers (broadly construed) who understand that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, pushing projects through to completion anyway. The outcome is sometimes so muddled to be worse than having done nothing, but also, shipping things under constraints, even though they could be much better on some axes is how civilization runs.
Anyway, this makes me think that I should attempt to do more engineering projects, or otherwise find ways to operate in domains where the goal is to get “good enough”, within a bunch of not-always crisply-defined constraints.