One of the most pernicious issues I’ve encountered in these discussions is the conversation that goes “hey, look at this cool thing that rationality isn’t very good at; I’m pretty sure we can do better” and the response is usually “so what, that’s already part of rationality, and any failure to achieve that is due to people being still aspiring rationalists”. I’m not sure its possible to convey in words why from the post-rationalist side this looks like a mistake, because from the other side it looks like trying to cut off a part of the art that you as a rationalist already have access to. All I can offer as way of evidence that this is a reasonable view from the post-rationalist side is that people that end up in the post-rationalist camp generally have a story of like “oh, yeah, I used to think that, but then this one thing flipped my thinking, everything clicked, and I was surprised at how dramatically little I understood or was capable of before” and this is happening to people who were already trained as rationalists.
I liked a lot of this an appreciate the format.
One of the most pernicious issues I’ve encountered in these discussions is the conversation that goes “hey, look at this cool thing that rationality isn’t very good at; I’m pretty sure we can do better” and the response is usually “so what, that’s already part of rationality, and any failure to achieve that is due to people being still aspiring rationalists”. I’m not sure its possible to convey in words why from the post-rationalist side this looks like a mistake, because from the other side it looks like trying to cut off a part of the art that you as a rationalist already have access to. All I can offer as way of evidence that this is a reasonable view from the post-rationalist side is that people that end up in the post-rationalist camp generally have a story of like “oh, yeah, I used to think that, but then this one thing flipped my thinking, everything clicked, and I was surprised at how dramatically little I understood or was capable of before” and this is happening to people who were already trained as rationalists.