Similarly, you can get a master’s degree in 2 years of courses, but a PhD requires an extended apprenticeship. The former is to teach you a body of knowledge, the latter is to teach you how to do research to extend that knowledge.
I’d also add that in his first lesson on metarationality, the one that opens with the Bongard problems, Chapman explicitly acknowledges that he is restricting his idea of a system to “a set of rules that can be printed in a book weighing less than ten kilograms, and which a person can consciously follow,” and that metarationality as he is thinking of it is systematic in that there exist rules you could write down that make it formulaic, but also that said rules would be too cumbersome to enact in this way. At that point, to me, disagreeing feels like arguing about whether “we” “could” “systematically” Chinese Room von Neumann: obviously mathematically yes, but also obviously practically no.
A lot of his later discussion of metarationality hinges on the idea of stances towards modes of thinking and acting and relating, and not holding necessarily and often invisibly imprecise ideas fixed too strongly in the mind. For example, the opening hypothetical conversation of In the Cells of the Eggplant has a very strong “Taboo your words!” vibe. A human’s guide to words features strongly throughout, really, and also the whole idea of stances in thinking as “metarationality” seems to me analogous to the idea of how metaethics is related to ethics. Many of the original sequences hinge on ideas that I think Chapman would characterize as metarational (and I would note that the sequences themselves frequently included EY talking about how something he thought was simple was actually incredibly complicated to convey and required dozens of prerequisites and isn’t something you could just tell someone and have them actually understand, even if you and they both think communication and understanding happened).
Similarly, you can get a master’s degree in 2 years of courses, but a PhD requires an extended apprenticeship. The former is to teach you a body of knowledge, the latter is to teach you how to do research to extend that knowledge.
I’d also add that in his first lesson on metarationality, the one that opens with the Bongard problems, Chapman explicitly acknowledges that he is restricting his idea of a system to “a set of rules that can be printed in a book weighing less than ten kilograms, and which a person can consciously follow,” and that metarationality as he is thinking of it is systematic in that there exist rules you could write down that make it formulaic, but also that said rules would be too cumbersome to enact in this way. At that point, to me, disagreeing feels like arguing about whether “we” “could” “systematically” Chinese Room von Neumann: obviously mathematically yes, but also obviously practically no.
A lot of his later discussion of metarationality hinges on the idea of stances towards modes of thinking and acting and relating, and not holding necessarily and often invisibly imprecise ideas fixed too strongly in the mind. For example, the opening hypothetical conversation of In the Cells of the Eggplant has a very strong “Taboo your words!” vibe. A human’s guide to words features strongly throughout, really, and also the whole idea of stances in thinking as “metarationality” seems to me analogous to the idea of how metaethics is related to ethics. Many of the original sequences hinge on ideas that I think Chapman would characterize as metarational (and I would note that the sequences themselves frequently included EY talking about how something he thought was simple was actually incredibly complicated to convey and required dozens of prerequisites and isn’t something you could just tell someone and have them actually understand, even if you and they both think communication and understanding happened).