Gut reaction: how could anyone ever trust such a person?
You can’t trust(1) = count on them to accurately report their likely future behavior or give you an accurate account of what they know. You can trust(2) = believe that they’re part of your coalition and expect them to act to favor that coalition over outsiders, by observing their costly signals of commitment, e.g. adherence to the narrative even when it’s inconvenient to do so, hard-to-fake signals of affection and valuing your well-being.
You seem to have already covered much of this in your own way. Thanks for the links; I’m going to look them over.
By the way, this focus on social stuff and so on..is this what they call metarationality? I’ve never quite understood the term, but you seem like you might be one who’d know
I figured better to merge into a shared discourse, especially since we seem to have independently arrived here. A lot of Robin Hanson’s old stuff is pretty explicitly about this, but I somehow failed to really get it until I thought it through myself.
This is definitely within the broad strain of thought sometimes called “postrationality” (I don’t recall hearing “metarationality” but this post links them), which as far as I can tell amounts to serious engagement with our nature as evolved, social beings with many strategies that generate “beliefs,” not all of which are epistemic. My angle—and apparently yours as well—is on the fact that if most people are persistently “irrational,” there might be some way in which “irrationality” is a coherent and powerful strategy, and “rationality” practice needs to seriously engage with that fact.
You can’t trust(1) = count on them to accurately report their likely future behavior or give you an accurate account of what they know. You can trust(2) = believe that they’re part of your coalition and expect them to act to favor that coalition over outsiders, by observing their costly signals of commitment, e.g. adherence to the narrative even when it’s inconvenient to do so, hard-to-fake signals of affection and valuing your well-being.
Related: Authenticity and instant readouts, Authenticity vs factual accuracy, Bindings and assurances
You seem to have already covered much of this in your own way. Thanks for the links; I’m going to look them over.
By the way, this focus on social stuff and so on..is this what they call metarationality? I’ve never quite understood the term, but you seem like you might be one who’d know
I figured better to merge into a shared discourse, especially since we seem to have independently arrived here. A lot of Robin Hanson’s old stuff is pretty explicitly about this, but I somehow failed to really get it until I thought it through myself.
This is definitely within the broad strain of thought sometimes called “postrationality” (I don’t recall hearing “metarationality” but this post links them), which as far as I can tell amounts to serious engagement with our nature as evolved, social beings with many strategies that generate “beliefs,” not all of which are epistemic. My angle—and apparently yours as well—is on the fact that if most people are persistently “irrational,” there might be some way in which “irrationality” is a coherent and powerful strategy, and “rationality” practice needs to seriously engage with that fact.