I agree that we should always be very careful before we allow ourselves an excuse, but I also believe that rationalists don’t seem to succeed as much as we might naively expect and that if we want to do better, we’ll have to first identify the source of he problem. Hazard manages to offer a really interesting take on this: that we underestimate the difficulty of improving on social norms from first principles (I provided some examples of how normal thinking can be better than we’d expect in my recent post on De-centering Bias). Unless we fully recognise the benefits of normal person thinking, it is going to be very easy to come up with a plan of action that is actually worse. And, I feel that we often do fall into this trap, because normal people are doing what they are doing either unreflectively or just because that is what everyone else is doing and we assume that just because we have put more thought into it than them, surely we’ll get a better outcome. Once we realise that this issue exists, we can be more cautious in rejecting social norms or in doing anything too weird and hopefully actually end up more successful than average. (As Elizier says, it is dangerous to be half a rationalist).
I agree that we should always be very careful before we allow ourselves an excuse, but I also believe that rationalists don’t seem to succeed as much as we might naively expect and that if we want to do better, we’ll have to first identify the source of he problem. Hazard manages to offer a really interesting take on this: that we underestimate the difficulty of improving on social norms from first principles (I provided some examples of how normal thinking can be better than we’d expect in my recent post on De-centering Bias). Unless we fully recognise the benefits of normal person thinking, it is going to be very easy to come up with a plan of action that is actually worse. And, I feel that we often do fall into this trap, because normal people are doing what they are doing either unreflectively or just because that is what everyone else is doing and we assume that just because we have put more thought into it than them, surely we’ll get a better outcome. Once we realise that this issue exists, we can be more cautious in rejecting social norms or in doing anything too weird and hopefully actually end up more successful than average. (As Elizier says, it is dangerous to be half a rationalist).