I think pseudo-rationality is still better than no rationality, and it’s not obviously possible for someone to move to “real” rationality without pseudo-rationality as an intermediate step.
Rationality is explicitly designed to be the kind of thing you can benefit from even if you’re not pure of heart, and that you can’t reliably fake to other people without actually doing. Also, you cannot simply make yourself have the right intentions if you don’t already have them.
This part of HPMOR comes to mind:
And it was also clear that Potter was brilliant, and a whole lot more than just slightly mad, and playing a vast game that Potter himself mostly didn’t understand, improvised at top speed with the subtlety of a rampaging nundu. But Potter had managed to choose a tactic that Draco couldn’t just walk away from. He had offered Draco a part of his own power, gambling that Draco couldn’t use it without becoming more like him. His father had called this an advanced technique, and had warned Draco that it often didn’t work.
The point is that there are Slytherins in the world who want to play the Rationalist game for Slytherin reasons, and that it’s futile to try fixing Slytherins by simply telling them Slytherin values are bad. The whole Rationalist game is designed so that the act of playing the game itself will corrupt even Slytherins towards the Light Side.
So I want to absolutely encourage any (fellow) Slytherins reading to play the Rationalist game as much as you like for whatever reasons you have. I’ve yet to see anyone play the game at all successfully without a noticeable improvement in the quality of their soul.
I think pseudo-rationality is still better than no rationality, and it’s not obviously possible for someone to move to “real” rationality without pseudo-rationality as an intermediate step.
I’m rather doubtful of this claim as presented. I agree that there is a you’re-worse-before-you’re-better effect involved in taking up any new skill, but why shoud we expect it to take the form of pseudo-rationality presented here. To me much of the behaviors of pseudo-rationality look like what happens if you try to mix in rationality to a person who already exhibits certain behaviors. Not to say that pseudo-rationality is not common, especially among actual rationalists, but that someone coming to rationality from a different background than that of the standard rationalist would probably take different sorts of missteps.
But maybe that’s what you meant and I’m just objecting to your phrasing that makes it sound as if pseudo-rationality is a propery someone might take up rather than a set of behaviors we observe them having.
I think I was confused and wanted to pick out that this notion of “pseudo-rationality” actually is an entangling of at least two distinct behaviors that I would treat completely separately, a la geeks, mops, sociopaths:
“Sociopaths” trying to game the rationalist social ladder for power without actually learning rationality.
“MOPs” trying to get as much out of rationality as possible with minimal effort and critical thinking.
I think I was mostly responding to the first set of things.
This article reminds me of “Uncritical Supercriticality”, where people argue in favor of “rationality” a little too hard. Could also be either an innocent mistake, or it can be done strategically for social reasons. (If it’s the latter, you are likely to put “rational” in the name of your website, because that gets even more social points.)
After writing this, not sure if I endorse this whole sentiment. To elaborate: it sounds to me like “pseudo-rationality” is just being badat rationality, and if people really wanted to optimize for social status in the rationality community there is one easiest canonical way to do this: get good at rationality. So there’s only a second-order difference between optimizing for pseudo-rationality and optimizing for rationality, and your post sort of just sounds like criticizing people for being bad rationalists in an unproductive tone.
There’s a flavor of pseudo-rationality which is about optimizing for social approval from other pseudo-rationalists, e.g. trying to write LW posts by mimicking Eliezer’s writing style or similar.
if people really wanted to optimize for social status in the rationality community there is one easiest canonical way to do this: get good at rationality.
I think this is false: even if your final goal is to optimize for social status in the community, real rationality would still force you to locally give it up because of convergent instrumental goals. There is in fact a significant first order difference.
One example is that the top tiers of the community are in fact composed largely of people who directly care about doing good things for the world, and this (surprise!) comes together with being extremely good at telling who’s faking it. So in fact you won’t be socially respected above a certain level until you optimize hard for altruistic goals.
Another example is that whatever your goals are, in the long run you’ll do better if you first become smart, rich, knowledgeable about AI, sign up for cryonics, prevent the world from ending etc.
I think pseudo-rationality is still better than no rationality, and it’s not obviously possible for someone to move to “real” rationality without pseudo-rationality as an intermediate step.
Rationality is explicitly designed to be the kind of thing you can benefit from even if you’re not pure of heart, and that you can’t reliably fake to other people without actually doing. Also, you cannot simply make yourself have the right intentions if you don’t already have them.
This part of HPMOR comes to mind:
And it was also clear that Potter was brilliant, and a whole lot more than just slightly mad, and playing a vast game that Potter himself mostly didn’t understand, improvised at top speed with the subtlety of a rampaging nundu. But Potter had managed to choose a tactic that Draco couldn’t just walk away from. He had offered Draco a part of his own power, gambling that Draco couldn’t use it without becoming more like him. His father had called this an advanced technique, and had warned Draco that it often didn’t work.
The point is that there are Slytherins in the world who want to play the Rationalist game for Slytherin reasons, and that it’s futile to try fixing Slytherins by simply telling them Slytherin values are bad. The whole Rationalist game is designed so that the act of playing the game itself will corrupt even Slytherins towards the Light Side.
So I want to absolutely encourage any (fellow) Slytherins reading to play the Rationalist game as much as you like for whatever reasons you have. I’ve yet to see anyone play the game at all successfully without a noticeable improvement in the quality of their soul.
I’m rather doubtful of this claim as presented. I agree that there is a you’re-worse-before-you’re-better effect involved in taking up any new skill, but why shoud we expect it to take the form of pseudo-rationality presented here. To me much of the behaviors of pseudo-rationality look like what happens if you try to mix in rationality to a person who already exhibits certain behaviors. Not to say that pseudo-rationality is not common, especially among actual rationalists, but that someone coming to rationality from a different background than that of the standard rationalist would probably take different sorts of missteps.
But maybe that’s what you meant and I’m just objecting to your phrasing that makes it sound as if pseudo-rationality is a propery someone might take up rather than a set of behaviors we observe them having.
I think I was confused and wanted to pick out that this notion of “pseudo-rationality” actually is an entangling of at least two distinct behaviors that I would treat completely separately, a la geeks, mops, sociopaths:
“Sociopaths” trying to game the rationalist social ladder for power without actually learning rationality.
“MOPs” trying to get as much out of rationality as possible with minimal effort and critical thinking.
I think I was mostly responding to the first set of things.
This article reminds me of “Uncritical Supercriticality”, where people argue in favor of “rationality” a little too hard. Could also be either an innocent mistake, or it can be done strategically for social reasons. (If it’s the latter, you are likely to put “rational” in the name of your website, because that gets even more social points.)
After writing this, not sure if I endorse this whole sentiment. To elaborate: it sounds to me like “pseudo-rationality” is just being bad at rationality, and if people really wanted to optimize for social status in the rationality community there is one easiest canonical way to do this: get good at rationality. So there’s only a second-order difference between optimizing for pseudo-rationality and optimizing for rationality, and your post sort of just sounds like criticizing people for being bad rationalists in an unproductive tone.
There’s a flavor of pseudo-rationality which is about optimizing for social approval from other pseudo-rationalists, e.g. trying to write LW posts by mimicking Eliezer’s writing style or similar.
I think this is false: even if your final goal is to optimize for social status in the community, real rationality would still force you to locally give it up because of convergent instrumental goals. There is in fact a significant first order difference.
Can you elaborate on this? I have the feeling that I agree now but I’m not certain what I’m agreeing with.
One example is that the top tiers of the community are in fact composed largely of people who directly care about doing good things for the world, and this (surprise!) comes together with being extremely good at telling who’s faking it. So in fact you won’t be socially respected above a certain level until you optimize hard for altruistic goals.
Another example is that whatever your goals are, in the long run you’ll do better if you first become smart, rich, knowledgeable about AI, sign up for cryonics, prevent the world from ending etc.