Instrumental rationality is doing whatever has the best expected outcome. So spending a ton of time thinking about metaethics may or may not be instrumentally rational, but saying “thinking rationally about metaethics is not rational” is using the world two different ways, and is the reason your post is so confusing to me.
On your example of a witch, I don’t actually see why believing that would be rational. But if you take a more straightforward example, say, “Not knowing that your boss is engaging in insider training, and not looking, could be rational,” then I agree. You might rationally choose to not check if a belief is false.
Why is it necessary to muddy the waters by saying “You might rationally have an irrational belief?”
you can in fact use a good-decision making process (rationally conclude) that a bad-decision making process (an irrational one) is sufficient for a particular task.
Of course. You can decide that learning something has negative expected consequences, and choose not to learn it. Or decide that learning it would have positive expected consequences, but that the value of information is low. Why use the “rational” and “irrational” labels?
Something like half of women will consider an abortion; their support or lack thereof has an enormous impact on whether that particular abortion is implemented. And if you’re proposing this as a general policy, the relevant question is whether overall people adopting your heuristic is good, meaning that the question of whether any given one of them can impact politics is less relevant. If lots of people adopt your heuristic, it matters.
For effective charities, everyone who gives to the religious organization selected by their church is orders of magnitude less effective than they could be. Thinking for themselves would allow them to save hundreds of lives over their lifetime.
Instrumental rationality is doing whatever has the best expected outcome. So spending a ton of time thinking about metaethics may or may not be instrumentally rational, but saying “thinking rationally about metaethics is not rational” is using the world two different ways, and is the reason your post is so confusing to me.
On your example of a witch, I don’t actually see why believing that would be rational. But if you take a more straightforward example, say, “Not knowing that your boss is engaging in insider training, and not looking, could be rational,” then I agree. You might rationally choose to not check if a belief is false.
Why is it necessary to muddy the waters by saying “You might rationally have an irrational belief?”
Of course. You can decide that learning something has negative expected consequences, and choose not to learn it. Or decide that learning it would have positive expected consequences, but that the value of information is low. Why use the “rational” and “irrational” labels?
Something like half of women will consider an abortion; their support or lack thereof has an enormous impact on whether that particular abortion is implemented. And if you’re proposing this as a general policy, the relevant question is whether overall people adopting your heuristic is good, meaning that the question of whether any given one of them can impact politics is less relevant. If lots of people adopt your heuristic, it matters.
For effective charities, everyone who gives to the religious organization selected by their church is orders of magnitude less effective than they could be. Thinking for themselves would allow them to save hundreds of lives over their lifetime.