Sure, balance is important. But if you look at Robin’s closing paragraph, it is not calling for balance:
“Perhaps martial-art-style rationality makes sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins forced by humanity’s vast stunning cluelessness to single-handedly block the coming robot rampage. But for those of us who respect the opinions of enough others to want to work with them to find truth, it makes more sense to design and field institutions which give each person better incentives to update a common consensus.”
What I get from the metaphor is that practicing martial-arts style rationality is as useless to our lives as practicing physical martial arts. And that is horridly wrong.
Thanks for explaining your downvote, but don’t apologize for it!
It was the characterization of martial-art-style rationality as only making sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins that gave me the impression—do you now agree that martial-arts-style rationality is actually useful for everyone?
The sizes here are so wildly different I don’t see them as really comparable. I have never in my life had to defend myself physically against serious harm. Yet I make decisions with my flawed monkey brain every minute of every day of my life! The benefit to me from improving the quality of my decisions (whatever you want to call that—martial-arts-style rationality works for me, but perhaps the term means something else to others) is orders of magnitude greater than the benefit of improving my ability to defend myself physically.
I mean, I seriously find it hard to understand how you can compare a skill that I have never used to a skill that I use every minute of my life ?!?! I agree with you that one must posit implausible scenarios for personal physical defense to be useful, but I think one must posit even less plausible scenarios for personal mental acuity to not be useful. Anyone can get mugged, but who never needs to make a tough decision affected by standard biases?
Sure, balance is important. But if you look at Robin’s closing paragraph, it is not calling for balance:
“Perhaps martial-art-style rationality makes sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins forced by humanity’s vast stunning cluelessness to single-handedly block the coming robot rampage. But for those of us who respect the opinions of enough others to want to work with them to find truth, it makes more sense to design and field institutions which give each person better incentives to update a common consensus.”
What I get from the metaphor is that practicing martial-arts style rationality is as useless to our lives as practicing physical martial arts. And that is horridly wrong.
Thanks for explaining your downvote, but don’t apologize for it!
I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression of “useless”; balance was more the idea.
It was the characterization of martial-art-style rationality as only making sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins that gave me the impression—do you now agree that martial-arts-style rationality is actually useful for everyone?
Sure, even combat martial arts is useful for everyone to some degree; the issue is the size of that degree.
The sizes here are so wildly different I don’t see them as really comparable. I have never in my life had to defend myself physically against serious harm. Yet I make decisions with my flawed monkey brain every minute of every day of my life! The benefit to me from improving the quality of my decisions (whatever you want to call that—martial-arts-style rationality works for me, but perhaps the term means something else to others) is orders of magnitude greater than the benefit of improving my ability to defend myself physically.
I mean, I seriously find it hard to understand how you can compare a skill that I have never used to a skill that I use every minute of my life ?!?! I agree with you that one must posit implausible scenarios for personal physical defense to be useful, but I think one must posit even less plausible scenarios for personal mental acuity to not be useful. Anyone can get mugged, but who never needs to make a tough decision affected by standard biases?
As you said, he wrote:
Hence, it is about balance.
EDIT: I’m taking some inferential steps here.
When reasonable people say A is more valuable than B, they don’t usually mean that you should buy N of A and 0 of B.
Robin is a reasonable person.