While “rationality” claims to be defined as “stuff that helps you win”, and while on paper if it turned out that the Sequences didn’t help you arrive at correct conclusions we’d stop calling that “rationality” and call something else “rationality”, in practise the word “rationality” points at “the stuff in the Sequences” rather than the “stuff that helps you win”, and that people with stuff that helps you win that isn’t the type of thing that you’d find in the Sequences have to call it something else to be unambiguous. Such is language.
The central claim of the Sequences is that what they expound is the stuff that helps you come to true beliefs and effective actions. It seems to me that that claim is well-founded. All the specific things I’ve seen touted as “Here’s where ‘rationality’ is wrong” have always seemed to me to either be addressed in the Sequences already, or to be so confused that even the writer can’t explain them. And all the things that do go beyond the Sequences (e.g. CFAR workshops—about which I have no detailed knowledge) do not brand themselves in opposition as “post-rationality”, any more than “applied mathematics” would be called “post-mathematics”.
David Chapman, to take one major example, is pretty oppository in his prospectus for his proposed book “In the Cells of the Eggplant”. I expect he would call it “extending”, but it’s more like hacking off all the limbs to replace them with tentacles.
My impression is that Chapman is objecting to a different kind of rationality, which he defines in a more specific and narrow way. At least, on several times in conversation when I’ve objected to him that LW-rationality already takes into account postrationality, he has responded with something like “LW-rationality has elements of what I’m criticizing, but this book is not specifically about LW-rationality”.
My impression agrees. I am inclined to say that Chapman seems to be targeting the kind of rationality criticized in Seeing Like a State, save that In the Cells of the Eggplant is about how unsatisfying the perspective is rather than the damage implementation does.
While “rationality” claims to be defined as “stuff that helps you win”, and while on paper if it turned out that the Sequences didn’t help you arrive at correct conclusions we’d stop calling that “rationality” and call something else “rationality”, in practise the word “rationality” points at “the stuff in the Sequences” rather than the “stuff that helps you win”, and that people with stuff that helps you win that isn’t the type of thing that you’d find in the Sequences have to call it something else to be unambiguous. Such is language.
The central claim of the Sequences is that what they expound is the stuff that helps you come to true beliefs and effective actions. It seems to me that that claim is well-founded. All the specific things I’ve seen touted as “Here’s where ‘rationality’ is wrong” have always seemed to me to either be addressed in the Sequences already, or to be so confused that even the writer can’t explain them. And all the things that do go beyond the Sequences (e.g. CFAR workshops—about which I have no detailed knowledge) do not brand themselves in opposition as “post-rationality”, any more than “applied mathematics” would be called “post-mathematics”.
Are you sure that post rationality is opposite to rationality? Where did that idea come from?
I’ve been involved in the loosely defined PR cluster for a while and I’ve not seen such a thing yet. Do you have a link?
“Opposition”, not “opposite”.
Pr is not in opposition either.
David Chapman, to take one major example, is pretty oppository in his prospectus for his proposed book “In the Cells of the Eggplant”. I expect he would call it “extending”, but it’s more like hacking off all the limbs to replace them with tentacles.
My impression is that Chapman is objecting to a different kind of rationality, which he defines in a more specific and narrow way. At least, on several times in conversation when I’ve objected to him that LW-rationality already takes into account postrationality, he has responded with something like “LW-rationality has elements of what I’m criticizing, but this book is not specifically about LW-rationality”.
My impression agrees. I am inclined to say that Chapman seems to be targeting the kind of rationality criticized in Seeing Like a State, save that In the Cells of the Eggplant is about how unsatisfying the perspective is rather than the damage implementation does.