Thanks for your thoughts; they’re all good ones! I’ve actually already engaged with the Rationality literature enough to have encountered most of them (I’m about 2⁄3 through The Sequences at the moment).
I think after reading people’s responses to this post, I realize that the scenario I outline here is even less likely than I originally thought. There are wrong ways to apply rationality, it’s true. But those are the failure modes @LeBleu alluded to. For everyone else, Rationality isn’t a destination, it’s a path. The updating is continuous. What happened for me is that I came from a different epistemological tradition and jumped ship to this one. Bushwhacking across terrain to get from one path to another is no fun. But now that I’m on a path, I’m not going to get into that kind of trouble again unless I leave the Rationality path entirely. So then the only question I need to be this worried about is whether the Rationality path is correct, and I’m pretty well convinced of that… but still willing to update, I suppose.
Go one step more meta, and realize that perfectionism itself is imperfect
The point about perfectionism is a good one. I’ve already recognized that perfectionism is not rational though, and it’s more of a compulsive behavior / default mental state to inherently assume that information is free and be down on myself for not already knowing it and executing perfectly on it. Perhaps I actually can fully overcome that, but I’m not expecting it (which would be the perfectionist thing to do anyway ;)
Thanks for your thoughts; they’re all good ones! I’ve actually already engaged with the Rationality literature enough to have encountered most of them (I’m about 2⁄3 through The Sequences at the moment).
I think after reading people’s responses to this post, I realize that the scenario I outline here is even less likely than I originally thought. There are wrong ways to apply rationality, it’s true. But those are the failure modes @LeBleu alluded to. For everyone else, Rationality isn’t a destination, it’s a path. The updating is continuous. What happened for me is that I came from a different epistemological tradition and jumped ship to this one. Bushwhacking across terrain to get from one path to another is no fun. But now that I’m on a path, I’m not going to get into that kind of trouble again unless I leave the Rationality path entirely. So then the only question I need to be this worried about is whether the Rationality path is correct, and I’m pretty well convinced of that… but still willing to update, I suppose.
The point about perfectionism is a good one. I’ve already recognized that perfectionism is not rational though, and it’s more of a compulsive behavior / default mental state to inherently assume that information is free and be down on myself for not already knowing it and executing perfectly on it. Perhaps I actually can fully overcome that, but I’m not expecting it (which would be the perfectionist thing to do anyway ;)