I think this post is missing the major part of what “metarational” means: acknowledging that the kinds of explicit principles and systems humans can hold in working memory and apply in real time are insufficient for capturing the full complexity of reality, having multiple such principles and systems available anyway, and skillfully switching among them in appropriate contexts.
We don’t have a meta-drive for offspring (although many people do explicitly want children at certain points in their lives). We (most of us) have a general drive to like sex, which in a specific context used to pretty reliably result in children, but we do not re-examine that drive and apply it only in that context. We re-use that drive in multiple other contexts for other purposes, but those are also mostly unexamined by most people.
We don’t have a meta-drive for honoring commitments like marriage. Instead we have social institutions and verbally-expressible moral principles we mutually agree to try to abide by and enforce. These evolve by a mix of unconscious selection effects and conscious reflection. The latter is usually led or spread by high-status, unusually-metarational members of the community, whose behaviors others choose to mimic without themselves possessing the metarational capability to skillfully re-derive, re-direct, and re-apply the process that generated them.
Similarly, the point about trash also ignores the larger context. Picking up my own trash has much less relationship to disgust, or germs, than picking up other people’s trash. I have gone to parks to pick up trash in general, but I do it with gloves and garbage bags and pickers and hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. I don’t fly back to Jamaica for a dropped tissue because of the larger context in which the costs, both personal and environmental, are greater to go than not. The mistake is made, a sunk cost in the true sense of “not worth continuing to invest in.”
This also is not an example of Copenhagen ethics. That would be, “You dropped a tissue. If you pick up up, then all the other trash is also your fault unless you pick it up, too. Doubly true if you pick up the candy bar wrapper that blew onto the ground next to the trash can.” The metarational solution to trash-in-parks would be “It’s a good norm to have, to pick up trash when it’s easy, because this generalizes well into a low-effort community-level solution to the large majority of trash. Then we can more skillfully direct scarce, expensive, in-depth clean-up efforts when they’re really needed and the norm is proving (or will predictably prove) insufficient.” Many but not all humans have this norm without understanding it—that’s part of why the old SSC post on Newtonian Ethics works as humor. But not all, which is why there is still a trash problem and insufficient coordination power in society to consistently and cheaply implement better solutions.
In other words, humans can be metarational, and make effective use of rational systems to manage pre-rational parts of ourselves. But those systems are still rational, and the parts are still pre-rational, and most people don’t develop these skills.
Similarly, the point about trash also ignores the larger context. Picking up my own trash has much less relationship to disgust, or germs, than picking up other people’s trash.
Agreed, but that’s exactly the point I’m making. Once you apply insights from rationality to situations outside spherical trash in a vacuum filled park you end up with all sorts of confounding affects that make the insights less applicable. Your point about germs and my point about fixing what you break are complimentary, not contradictory.
I think this post is missing the major part of what “metarational” means: acknowledging that the kinds of explicit principles and systems humans can hold in working memory and apply in real time are insufficient for capturing the full complexity of reality, having multiple such principles and systems available anyway, and skillfully switching among them in appropriate contexts.
This sounds to me like a semantic issue? Metarational isn’t exactly a standard AFAIAA, (I just made it up on the spot), and it looks like you’re using it to refer to a different concept from me.
I first encountered the term from David Chapman’s work (as described in the blog/metabook I linked) and was under the impression he coined the term, so that’s what I assumed you were referring to. If there is another definition you’re using, it might be good to add a note explaining what you mean by it. So yes, there is a semantic issue here contributing to why I misunderstood the post. I don’t quite know what your intended definition is, so take my comments in that context.
In any case, I highly recommend Chapman’s work on metarationality if you’re unfamiliar with it. I think it answers a lot of the questions you raise here. He has noticed the skulls. In light of that, I don’t think there’s just a semantic issue here. I think there is a natural grouping of non-rational natural selection, pre-reational human drives, rational systematic thinking, and meta-rational skillful use of systematic thinking, and that a lot of the discussion in this post goes back and forth between pre-rational and meta-rational without distinguishing between them. This is something that people do all the time, because they do look the same until you’ve actually succeeded in developing the meta-rational skills needed to understand the difference (or until you’ve had the difference pointed out to you, if you developed the skills without needing the ontology).
I think this post is missing the major part of what “metarational” means: acknowledging that the kinds of explicit principles and systems humans can hold in working memory and apply in real time are insufficient for capturing the full complexity of reality, having multiple such principles and systems available anyway, and skillfully switching among them in appropriate contexts.
We don’t have a meta-drive for offspring (although many people do explicitly want children at certain points in their lives). We (most of us) have a general drive to like sex, which in a specific context used to pretty reliably result in children, but we do not re-examine that drive and apply it only in that context. We re-use that drive in multiple other contexts for other purposes, but those are also mostly unexamined by most people.
We don’t have a meta-drive for honoring commitments like marriage. Instead we have social institutions and verbally-expressible moral principles we mutually agree to try to abide by and enforce. These evolve by a mix of unconscious selection effects and conscious reflection. The latter is usually led or spread by high-status, unusually-metarational members of the community, whose behaviors others choose to mimic without themselves possessing the metarational capability to skillfully re-derive, re-direct, and re-apply the process that generated them.
Similarly, the point about trash also ignores the larger context. Picking up my own trash has much less relationship to disgust, or germs, than picking up other people’s trash. I have gone to parks to pick up trash in general, but I do it with gloves and garbage bags and pickers and hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. I don’t fly back to Jamaica for a dropped tissue because of the larger context in which the costs, both personal and environmental, are greater to go than not. The mistake is made, a sunk cost in the true sense of “not worth continuing to invest in.”
This also is not an example of Copenhagen ethics. That would be, “You dropped a tissue. If you pick up up, then all the other trash is also your fault unless you pick it up, too. Doubly true if you pick up the candy bar wrapper that blew onto the ground next to the trash can.” The metarational solution to trash-in-parks would be “It’s a good norm to have, to pick up trash when it’s easy, because this generalizes well into a low-effort community-level solution to the large majority of trash. Then we can more skillfully direct scarce, expensive, in-depth clean-up efforts when they’re really needed and the norm is proving (or will predictably prove) insufficient.” Many but not all humans have this norm without understanding it—that’s part of why the old SSC post on Newtonian Ethics works as humor. But not all, which is why there is still a trash problem and insufficient coordination power in society to consistently and cheaply implement better solutions.
In other words, humans can be metarational, and make effective use of rational systems to manage pre-rational parts of ourselves. But those systems are still rational, and the parts are still pre-rational, and most people don’t develop these skills.
Agreed, but that’s exactly the point I’m making. Once you apply insights from rationality to situations outside spherical trash in a vacuum filled park you end up with all sorts of confounding affects that make the insights less applicable. Your point about germs and my point about fixing what you break are complimentary, not contradictory.
This sounds to me like a semantic issue? Metarational isn’t exactly a standard AFAIAA, (I just made it up on the spot), and it looks like you’re using it to refer to a different concept from me.
I first encountered the term from David Chapman’s work (as described in the blog/metabook I linked) and was under the impression he coined the term, so that’s what I assumed you were referring to. If there is another definition you’re using, it might be good to add a note explaining what you mean by it. So yes, there is a semantic issue here contributing to why I misunderstood the post. I don’t quite know what your intended definition is, so take my comments in that context.
In any case, I highly recommend Chapman’s work on metarationality if you’re unfamiliar with it. I think it answers a lot of the questions you raise here. He has noticed the skulls. In light of that, I don’t think there’s just a semantic issue here. I think there is a natural grouping of non-rational natural selection, pre-reational human drives, rational systematic thinking, and meta-rational skillful use of systematic thinking, and that a lot of the discussion in this post goes back and forth between pre-rational and meta-rational without distinguishing between them. This is something that people do all the time, because they do look the same until you’ve actually succeeded in developing the meta-rational skills needed to understand the difference (or until you’ve had the difference pointed out to you, if you developed the skills without needing the ontology).