We simply don’t have the time and computing power to use full rigor on our individual decisions, so we need an alternative strategy. As I understand it, the human brain operates largely on caching. X-rationality allows us to clean and maintain our caches more thoroughly than does traditional rationality. At first, it seems reasonable to expect this to yield higher success rates.
However, our intuition vastly underestimates the size of our personal caches. Furthermore, traditional rationality is simply faster at cleaning, even if it leaves a lot of junk behind. So it would appear that we should do most of the work with traditional rationality, then apply the slower x-rationality process for subtle refinement. But since x-rationality is so much slower and more difficult to run, it takes a whole giant heap of time and effort to get through a significant portion of the cache, and along the way many potential corrections will have already been achieved in the traditional rationality first pass.
But if we leave out the more rigorous methods entirely, deeming them too expensive, we’re doomed to hit a pitfall where traditional rationality will not save us from thirty years of pursuing a bad idea. If we can notice these pitfalls quickly, we can apply the slow x-rationality process to that part of the cache right away, and we might only pursue the bad idea for thirty minutes instead.
We need to be able to reason clearly, to identify opportunities for clearer reasoning, and to identify our own terminal goals. A flaw in any of these pieces can limit our effectiveness, in addition to the limits of just being human. What other limiting factors might there be? What methods can we use to improve them? I keep coming back to Less Wrong because I imagine this is the most likely site to provide me with discourse on the matter.
Clear reasoning: there is no evidence that humans have some fixed set of terminal goals (afortiori, there is no unchanging essence of personhood). There is also no discernible difference between discovering “true” goals and changing goals. Am you can’t fix reasoning by fixing reasoning, you need to fix emotion and habit too.
We simply don’t have the time and computing power to use full rigor on our individual decisions, so we need an alternative strategy. As I understand it, the human brain operates largely on caching. X-rationality allows us to clean and maintain our caches more thoroughly than does traditional rationality. At first, it seems reasonable to expect this to yield higher success rates.
However, our intuition vastly underestimates the size of our personal caches. Furthermore, traditional rationality is simply faster at cleaning, even if it leaves a lot of junk behind. So it would appear that we should do most of the work with traditional rationality, then apply the slower x-rationality process for subtle refinement. But since x-rationality is so much slower and more difficult to run, it takes a whole giant heap of time and effort to get through a significant portion of the cache, and along the way many potential corrections will have already been achieved in the traditional rationality first pass.
But if we leave out the more rigorous methods entirely, deeming them too expensive, we’re doomed to hit a pitfall where traditional rationality will not save us from thirty years of pursuing a bad idea. If we can notice these pitfalls quickly, we can apply the slow x-rationality process to that part of the cache right away, and we might only pursue the bad idea for thirty minutes instead.
We need to be able to reason clearly, to identify opportunities for clearer reasoning, and to identify our own terminal goals. A flaw in any of these pieces can limit our effectiveness, in addition to the limits of just being human. What other limiting factors might there be? What methods can we use to improve them? I keep coming back to Less Wrong because I imagine this is the most likely site to provide me with discourse on the matter.
Clear reasoning: there is no evidence that humans have some fixed set of terminal goals (afortiori, there is no unchanging essence of personhood). There is also no discernible difference between discovering “true” goals and changing goals. Am you can’t fix reasoning by fixing reasoning, you need to fix emotion and habit too.