I haven’t found any system of thought besides LW-style rationality that would be sufficient to even start thinking about your values, and even LW-style rationality isn’t enough. More concretely, very few people know about illusion of introspection, evolutionary psychology, verbal overshadowing, the ‘thermodynamics of cognition’, revealed preference (and how ‘revealed’ doesn’t mean ‘actual’), cognitive biases, and in general that fundamental truth that you can’t believe everything you think. And more importantly, the practical and ingrained knowledge that things like those are always sitting there waiting to trip you up, if you don’t unpack your intuitions and think carefully about them. Of course I can’t suggest a process for determining what you value (or what you ‘should’ value) since that’s like the problem of the human condition, but I know that each one of those things I listed would most likely have to be accounted for in such a process.
Or is “art of rationality” meant to pretty much cover all of philosophy or at least “good” philosophy?
Hm… the way you say it makes me want to say “no, that would be silly and arrogant, of course I don’t think that”, but ya know I spent a fair amount of time using ‘philosophy’ before I came across Less Wrong, and it turns out philosophy, unlike rationality, just isn’t useful for answering the questions I care about. So, yeah, I’ll bite that bullet. The “art of rationality” covers “good” philosophy, since most philosophy sucks and what doesn’t suck has been absorbed. But that isn’t to say that LW-style philosophy hasn’t added a huge amount of content that makes the other stuff look weak by comparison.
(I should say, it’s not like something like LW-style rationality didn’t exist before; you, for instance, managed to find and make progress on interesting and important questions long before there were ‘sequences’. I’m not saying LW invented thinking. It’s just that the magic that people utilized to do better than traditional rationality was never really put down in a single place, as far as I know.)
I don’t disagree with what you write here, but I think if you say something like “You use the art of rationality to determine what you value” you’ll raise the expectation that there is already an art of rationality that can be used to determine what someone values, and then people will be disappointed when they look closer and find out that’s not the case.
Ah, I see your point. So the less misleading thing to say might be something roughly like: “We don’t yet know how to find or reason about our values, but we have notions of where we might start, and we can expect that whatever methods do end up making headway are going to have to be non-stupid in at least as many ways as our existing methods of solving hard problems are non-stupid.”
I haven’t found any system of thought besides LW-style rationality that would be sufficient to even start thinking about your values, and even LW-style rationality isn’t enough. More concretely, very few people know about illusion of introspection, evolutionary psychology, verbal overshadowing, the ‘thermodynamics of cognition’, revealed preference (and how ‘revealed’ doesn’t mean ‘actual’), cognitive biases, and in general that fundamental truth that you can’t believe everything you think. And more importantly, the practical and ingrained knowledge that things like those are always sitting there waiting to trip you up, if you don’t unpack your intuitions and think carefully about them. Of course I can’t suggest a process for determining what you value (or what you ‘should’ value) since that’s like the problem of the human condition, but I know that each one of those things I listed would most likely have to be accounted for in such a process.
Hm… the way you say it makes me want to say “no, that would be silly and arrogant, of course I don’t think that”, but ya know I spent a fair amount of time using ‘philosophy’ before I came across Less Wrong, and it turns out philosophy, unlike rationality, just isn’t useful for answering the questions I care about. So, yeah, I’ll bite that bullet. The “art of rationality” covers “good” philosophy, since most philosophy sucks and what doesn’t suck has been absorbed. But that isn’t to say that LW-style philosophy hasn’t added a huge amount of content that makes the other stuff look weak by comparison.
(I should say, it’s not like something like LW-style rationality didn’t exist before; you, for instance, managed to find and make progress on interesting and important questions long before there were ‘sequences’. I’m not saying LW invented thinking. It’s just that the magic that people utilized to do better than traditional rationality was never really put down in a single place, as far as I know.)
I don’t disagree with what you write here, but I think if you say something like “You use the art of rationality to determine what you value” you’ll raise the expectation that there is already an art of rationality that can be used to determine what someone values, and then people will be disappointed when they look closer and find out that’s not the case.
Ah, I see your point. So the less misleading thing to say might be something roughly like: “We don’t yet know how to find or reason about our values, but we have notions of where we might start, and we can expect that whatever methods do end up making headway are going to have to be non-stupid in at least as many ways as our existing methods of solving hard problems are non-stupid.”