Yall, I’m actually sorta confused about the binary between epistemic and instrumental rationality. In my brain I have this labeling scheme like “PLOS is about epistemic rationality”. I think of epistemic and instrumental as a fairly clean binary, because a typecheckerish view of expected value theory separates utilities/values and probabilities very explicitly. A measure forms a coefficient for a valuation, or the other way around.
But I’ve really had baked in that I shouldn’t conflate believing true things (“epistemics”: prediction, anticipation constraint, paying rent) with modifying the world (“instrumentals”: valuing stuff, ordering states of the world, steering the future). This has seemed deeply important, because is and ought are perpendicular.
But what if that’s just not how it is? what if there’s a fuzzy boundary? I feel weird.
Yall, I’m actually sorta confused about the binary between epistemic and instrumental rationality. In my brain I have this labeling scheme like “PLOS is about epistemic rationality”. I think of epistemic and instrumental as a fairly clean binary, because a typecheckerish view of expected value theory separates utilities/values and probabilities very explicitly. A measure forms a coefficient for a valuation, or the other way around.
But I’ve really had baked in that I shouldn’t conflate believing true things (“epistemics”: prediction, anticipation constraint, paying rent) with modifying the world (“instrumentals”: valuing stuff, ordering states of the world, steering the future). This has seemed deeply important, because is and ought are perpendicular.
But what if that’s just not how it is? what if there’s a fuzzy boundary? I feel weird.
But in hindsight I should probably have been confused ever since description length minimization = utility maximization