I’ve lately been thinking that the rationality I practice, develop, and sometimes teach, is better described as a “discipline” than an “art”. Discipline like “an activity, exercise, or regimen that develops or improves a skill”, or “to bring to a state of order and obedience by training and control”.
The closest dictionary.com definition of “art” that looks very relevant to me is “any field using the skills or techniques of [the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance]”.
”The art of rationality” sounds a little too much to me like “we follow our whims and focus on the shiny things”, whereas “the discipline of rationality” has a lot more of “and then I did the hard and boring thing for the 10,000th time in a row because there’s simply no better way to hone a reflex or maintain form over time”.
I don’t intend to be mean to art here; I consider myself somewhat of an artist, in visual, written, and perhaps kinesthetic media. And it definitely takes a lot of discipline, as well as a bit of science, to make good art reliably. But what is it that makes a practice more of an art, rather than more of a something-else? I think it has something to do with a focus on expression. You experience a recognition of beauty or quality or significance, and then you create an expression of whatever you felt in response to the experience. Art is about expressing beauty. (“Express” in the sense of “to show, manifest, or reveal”.)
Is rationality about expressing beauty?
No!
Rationality is about figuring out how to not do quite so much dumb shit all the time, in the course of trying not to do quite so much dumb shit all the time.
Which I readily admit is beautiful. But I think that’s incidental?
Rationality tends to benefit from some tools that are relevant to artists, such as skillful perception, and perhaps others but honestly that’s the only one I have in mind right now. But it draws a lot more heavily on the tools of science, statistics, and psychology than on the tools of art.
”The art of rationality” sounds cool, but just like “martial arts”, it’s… sort of misleading, and I worry it contributes to a concept of rationality that does not include the forbearance, dedication, persistence, patience, discipline that is actually required.
Edit: Someone on the Facebook version of this brought up the “art of war”, and I replied, “i guess i’ve just never gotten this use of ‘art’. i think i hear it as ‘people do it and also we don’t really understand it and also rather than wishing we understood it we glorify the mystery’.
Edit edit: More from Facebook:
i agree with a lot of these… “criticisms” seems a bit too strong for what they actually are. i agree with stuff in a lot of these comments, especially the Duncan things. i could tell even as i was writing the OP that something was coming out sideways. i’d like to find the Something that came out sideways and do something a bit more productive with it, though. like, i wrote the stuff in the OP because i have a frustration and a longing, and it has a lot more to do with the goodness of “discipline” than with the badness of “art”.
i think rationality enthusiasts, perhaps in part because of founder effects and/or programmer culture?, tend to have a sort of laziness fetish or something that has huge benefits and also seems to me to have lead to a ton of throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bath-water.
[One commenter] sais, “for me the word “discipline” has a connotation of “willpower”, which doesn’t quite work for me with regards to rationality. It reminds me of something I think you (?) wrote on Facebook some time ago. Badly paraphrased from my lousy memory, it was something like: “Lots of rationality advice can be boiled down to: ‘See that dumb thing your brain does? Don’t do that.’”″
(i did indeed say something like that.)
i don’t know what or how real [commenter] thinks, but there’s a kind of person i’m quite certain exists who could well have uttered such a paragraph, who isn’t very aware that they’re breaking their conceptualization of deliberate action into a false dichotomy like “manifest outcomes through blunt force of will” and “do the things that are cheap and easy for you but otherwise just let things happen”. i conjecture that the history of rationality over the past ten years involves a lot of taking this dichotomy for granted and only seriously considering practices that are cheap and easy, because, obviously, relying on blunt force of will all the time is very stupid.
according to me, there’s this entire realm of human virtue/skill/enculturation/training that involves… i don’t know, the closest i’ve ever come to trying to say it is my essay on patient observation at the end of the naturalism series, and the painting that’s in it. some things that remind me of it include courage, the bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where he talks about how to paint, the strengths that my stereotype of people in the military and also ancient Greek heroes have but my dancing buddies and contemporary liberal culture in general seems to lack or sometimes even disparage, an expectation that life is hard and part of being good human is not just insisting on the world being different but also developing what’s needed to cope gracefully with reality as it currently exists. i dunno that’s maybe just one corner of the thing.
anyway i think part of what i’m doing with myself in general is advocating for the deliberate development of some relatively unpleasant human capacities such as patience and not shutting down when there is danger and not giving up immediately when things seem dauntingly complicated. and the OP came from some not-yet-satisfactorilly-expressed motivation for that project.
and “discipline” is often my shorthand for a big chunk of that cluster of stuff.
I’ve lately been thinking that the rationality I practice, develop, and sometimes teach, is better described as a “discipline” than an “art”. Discipline like “an activity, exercise, or regimen that develops or improves a skill”, or “to bring to a state of order and obedience by training and control”.
The closest dictionary.com definition of “art” that looks very relevant to me is “any field using the skills or techniques of [the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance]”.
”The art of rationality” sounds a little too much to me like “we follow our whims and focus on the shiny things”, whereas “the discipline of rationality” has a lot more of “and then I did the hard and boring thing for the 10,000th time in a row because there’s simply no better way to hone a reflex or maintain form over time”.
I don’t intend to be mean to art here; I consider myself somewhat of an artist, in visual, written, and perhaps kinesthetic media. And it definitely takes a lot of discipline, as well as a bit of science, to make good art reliably. But what is it that makes a practice more of an art, rather than more of a something-else? I think it has something to do with a focus on expression. You experience a recognition of beauty or quality or significance, and then you create an expression of whatever you felt in response to the experience. Art is about expressing beauty. (“Express” in the sense of “to show, manifest, or reveal”.)
Is rationality about expressing beauty?
No!
Rationality is about figuring out how to not do quite so much dumb shit all the time, in the course of trying not to do quite so much dumb shit all the time.
Which I readily admit is beautiful. But I think that’s incidental?
Rationality tends to benefit from some tools that are relevant to artists, such as skillful perception, and perhaps others but honestly that’s the only one I have in mind right now. But it draws a lot more heavily on the tools of science, statistics, and psychology than on the tools of art.
”The art of rationality” sounds cool, but just like “martial arts”, it’s… sort of misleading, and I worry it contributes to a concept of rationality that does not include the forbearance, dedication, persistence, patience, discipline that is actually required.
Edit: Someone on the Facebook version of this brought up the “art of war”, and I replied, “i guess i’ve just never gotten this use of ‘art’. i think i hear it as ‘people do it and also we don’t really understand it and also rather than wishing we understood it we glorify the mystery’.
Edit edit: More from Facebook:
i agree with a lot of these… “criticisms” seems a bit too strong for what they actually are. i agree with stuff in a lot of these comments, especially the Duncan things. i could tell even as i was writing the OP that something was coming out sideways. i’d like to find the Something that came out sideways and do something a bit more productive with it, though. like, i wrote the stuff in the OP because i have a frustration and a longing, and it has a lot more to do with the goodness of “discipline” than with the badness of “art”.
i think rationality enthusiasts, perhaps in part because of founder effects and/or programmer culture?, tend to have a sort of laziness fetish or something that has huge benefits and also seems to me to have lead to a ton of throwing-out-the-baby-with-the-bath-water.
[One commenter] sais, “for me the word “discipline” has a connotation of “willpower”, which doesn’t quite work for me with regards to rationality. It reminds me of something I think you (?) wrote on Facebook some time ago. Badly paraphrased from my lousy memory, it was something like: “Lots of rationality advice can be boiled down to: ‘See that dumb thing your brain does? Don’t do that.’”″
(i did indeed say something like that.)
i don’t know what or how real [commenter] thinks, but there’s a kind of person i’m quite certain exists who could well have uttered such a paragraph, who isn’t very aware that they’re breaking their conceptualization of deliberate action into a false dichotomy like “manifest outcomes through blunt force of will” and “do the things that are cheap and easy for you but otherwise just let things happen”. i conjecture that the history of rationality over the past ten years involves a lot of taking this dichotomy for granted and only seriously considering practices that are cheap and easy, because, obviously, relying on blunt force of will all the time is very stupid.
according to me, there’s this entire realm of human virtue/skill/enculturation/training that involves… i don’t know, the closest i’ve ever come to trying to say it is my essay on patient observation at the end of the naturalism series, and the painting that’s in it. some things that remind me of it include courage, the bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where he talks about how to paint, the strengths that my stereotype of people in the military and also ancient Greek heroes have but my dancing buddies and contemporary liberal culture in general seems to lack or sometimes even disparage, an expectation that life is hard and part of being good human is not just insisting on the world being different but also developing what’s needed to cope gracefully with reality as it currently exists. i dunno that’s maybe just one corner of the thing.
anyway i think part of what i’m doing with myself in general is advocating for the deliberate development of some relatively unpleasant human capacities such as patience and not shutting down when there is danger and not giving up immediately when things seem dauntingly complicated. and the OP came from some not-yet-satisfactorilly-expressed motivation for that project.
and “discipline” is often my shorthand for a big chunk of that cluster of stuff.
“Sometimes science is more art than science Morty.”
fyi i just added some stuff to the OP that you’ll prbly wanna see