I only heard this phrase “postrationality” for the first time a few days ago, maybe because I don’t keep up with the rationality-blog-metaverse that well, and I really don’t understand it.
Allthedescriptions I come across when I look for them seem to describe “rationality, plus being willing to talk about human experience too”, but I thought the LW-sphere was already into talking about human experience and whatnot. So is it just “we’re not comfortable talking about human experience on in the rationalist sphere so we made our own sphere”? That is, a cultural divide?
That first link writes “Postrationality recognizes that System 1 and System 2 (if they even exist) have different strengths and weaknesses, and what we need is an appropriate interplay between the two.”. Yet I would imagine everyone on LW would be interested in talking about System 1 and how it works and anything interesting we can say about it. So what’s the difference?
I’m not a massive fan of the ‘postrationality’ label but I do like some of the content, so I thought I’d try and explain why I’m attracted to it. I hope this comment is not too long. I’m not deeply involved but I have spent a lot of time recently reading my way through David Chapman’s Meaningness site and commenting there a bit (as ‘lk’).
One of my minor obsessions is thinking and reading about the role of intuition in maths. (Probably the best example of what I’m thinking of is Thurston’s wonderful Proof and Progress in Mathematics.) As Thurston’s essay describes, mathematicians make progress using a range of human faculties including not just logical deduction but also spatial and geometric intuition, language, metaphors and associations, and processes occurring in time. Chapman is good on this, whereas a lot of the original Less Wrong content seems to have rather a narrow focus on logic and probabilistic inference. (I think this is less true now.)
Mathematical intuition is how I normally approach this subject, but I think this is generally applicable to how we reason about all kinds of topics and come to useful conclusions. There should be a really wide variety of literature to raid for insights here. I’d expect useful contributions from fields such as phenomenology and meditation practice (and some of the ‘instrumental rationality’ folk wisdom) where there’s a focus on introspection of private mental phenomena, and also looking at the same thing from the outside and trying to study how people in a specific field think about problems (apparently this is called ‘ethnomethodology’.) There’s probably also a fair bit to extract more widely from continental philosophy and pomo literature, which I know little about (I’m aware there’s also lots of rubbish).
There’s another side to the postrationality thing that seems to involve a strong interest in various ‘social technologies’ and ritual practices, which often shades into what I’ll kind-of-uncharitably call LARPing various religious/traditional beliefs. I think the idea is that you have to be involved pretty deeply in some version of Buddhism/Catholicism/paganism/whatever to gain any kind of visceral understanding of what’s useful there. From the outside, though, it still looks like a lot of rather uncritical acceptance of the usual sort of traditional rubbish humans believe, and getting involved with one particular type of this seems kind of arbitrary to me. (I exclude Chapman from this criticism, he is very forthright about what he think is bad/useless in Buddhism and what he thinks is worth preserving.) It’s probably obvious at this point that I don’t at all understand the appeal of this myself, though I’m open to learning more about it.
Obviously different people do things for different reasons, but I infer that a lot of people started identifying as post-rationalist when they felt it was no longer cool to be associated with the rationalist movement. There have been a number of episodes of Internet drama over the last several years, any one of which might be alienating to some subset of people; those people might still like a lot of these ideas, but feel rejected from the “core group” as they perceive it.
The natural Schelling point for people who feel rejected by the rationality movement is to try to find a Rationality 2.0 movement that has all the stuff they liked without the stuff they didn’t like. This Schelling point seems to be stable regardless of whether Rationality 2.0 has any actual content or clear definition.
I only heard this phrase “postrationality” for the first time a few days ago, maybe because I don’t keep up with the rationality-blog-metaverse that well, and I really don’t understand it.
All the descriptions I come across when I look for them seem to describe “rationality, plus being willing to talk about human experience too”, but I thought the LW-sphere was already into talking about human experience and whatnot. So is it just “we’re not comfortable talking about human experience on in the rationalist sphere so we made our own sphere”? That is, a cultural divide?
That first link writes “Postrationality recognizes that System 1 and System 2 (if they even exist) have different strengths and weaknesses, and what we need is an appropriate interplay between the two.”. Yet I would imagine everyone on LW would be interested in talking about System 1 and how it works and anything interesting we can say about it. So what’s the difference?
I’m not a massive fan of the ‘postrationality’ label but I do like some of the content, so I thought I’d try and explain why I’m attracted to it. I hope this comment is not too long. I’m not deeply involved but I have spent a lot of time recently reading my way through David Chapman’s Meaningness site and commenting there a bit (as ‘lk’).
One of my minor obsessions is thinking and reading about the role of intuition in maths. (Probably the best example of what I’m thinking of is Thurston’s wonderful Proof and Progress in Mathematics.) As Thurston’s essay describes, mathematicians make progress using a range of human faculties including not just logical deduction but also spatial and geometric intuition, language, metaphors and associations, and processes occurring in time. Chapman is good on this, whereas a lot of the original Less Wrong content seems to have rather a narrow focus on logic and probabilistic inference. (I think this is less true now.)
Mathematical intuition is how I normally approach this subject, but I think this is generally applicable to how we reason about all kinds of topics and come to useful conclusions. There should be a really wide variety of literature to raid for insights here. I’d expect useful contributions from fields such as phenomenology and meditation practice (and some of the ‘instrumental rationality’ folk wisdom) where there’s a focus on introspection of private mental phenomena, and also looking at the same thing from the outside and trying to study how people in a specific field think about problems (apparently this is called ‘ethnomethodology’.) There’s probably also a fair bit to extract more widely from continental philosophy and pomo literature, which I know little about (I’m aware there’s also lots of rubbish).
There’s another side to the postrationality thing that seems to involve a strong interest in various ‘social technologies’ and ritual practices, which often shades into what I’ll kind-of-uncharitably call LARPing various religious/traditional beliefs. I think the idea is that you have to be involved pretty deeply in some version of Buddhism/Catholicism/paganism/whatever to gain any kind of visceral understanding of what’s useful there. From the outside, though, it still looks like a lot of rather uncritical acceptance of the usual sort of traditional rubbish humans believe, and getting involved with one particular type of this seems kind of arbitrary to me. (I exclude Chapman from this criticism, he is very forthright about what he think is bad/useless in Buddhism and what he thinks is worth preserving.) It’s probably obvious at this point that I don’t at all understand the appeal of this myself, though I’m open to learning more about it.
Obviously different people do things for different reasons, but I infer that a lot of people started identifying as post-rationalist when they felt it was no longer cool to be associated with the rationalist movement. There have been a number of episodes of Internet drama over the last several years, any one of which might be alienating to some subset of people; those people might still like a lot of these ideas, but feel rejected from the “core group” as they perceive it.
The natural Schelling point for people who feel rejected by the rationality movement is to try to find a Rationality 2.0 movement that has all the stuff they liked without the stuff they didn’t like. This Schelling point seems to be stable regardless of whether Rationality 2.0 has any actual content or clear definition.