Well, yes, but nobody’s going to get paid (in status) by putting it that way. It needs to be much more obfuscated and have a lot of math that requires mental contortions to apply to actual human choices.
More seriously, yes, but most of those words need multiple books worth of exploration to fully understand. “basically just”: what are the limits, edge cases, and applicability of exceptions. “comparing”: on what dimensions, and how to handle uncertainty that often overwhelms the simple calculations. “alternatives”: there are a near-infinite number, how to discover and filter the ones worth thinking about. “picking”: what does this even mean? how does choice work? “best”: what does THIS even mean? How would one know if an alternative is better than another?
Oh, and I guess “right?”: what would “wrong” look like, and how would you know which it is?
Yeah I guess the “just” was in jest, we all know how complicated this gets when you’re serious about it.
I considered adding a paragraph about how and why people fail to do this, how this definition characterizes ingroup and outgroup, and could probably write an entire post about it.
Not quite, in my opinion. In practice, humans tend to be wrong in predictable ways (what we call a “bias”) and so picking the best option isn’t easy.
What we call “rationality” tends to be the techniques / thought patterns that make us more likely to pick the best option when comparing alternatives.
Rationality is basically just comparing alternatives and picking the best one, right?
Yes, but the hardest part of that turns out to be generating high quality model alternatives under limited compute lmao
Yes, but doing that correctly requires a lot of preparation.
Well, yes, but nobody’s going to get paid (in status) by putting it that way. It needs to be much more obfuscated and have a lot of math that requires mental contortions to apply to actual human choices.
More seriously, yes, but most of those words need multiple books worth of exploration to fully understand. “basically just”: what are the limits, edge cases, and applicability of exceptions. “comparing”: on what dimensions, and how to handle uncertainty that often overwhelms the simple calculations. “alternatives”: there are a near-infinite number, how to discover and filter the ones worth thinking about. “picking”: what does this even mean? how does choice work? “best”: what does THIS even mean? How would one know if an alternative is better than another?
Oh, and I guess “right?”: what would “wrong” look like, and how would you know which it is?
Yeah I guess the “just” was in jest, we all know how complicated this gets when you’re serious about it.
I considered adding a paragraph about how and why people fail to do this, how this definition characterizes ingroup and outgroup, and could probably write an entire post about it.
Not quite, in my opinion. In practice, humans tend to be wrong in predictable ways (what we call a “bias”) and so picking the best option isn’t easy.
What we call “rationality” tends to be the techniques / thought patterns that make us more likely to pick the best option when comparing alternatives.