After careful reading, my understanding is that DanielLC is saying:
“Akrasia generally harms your instrumental rationality only. Except that you need some basic knowledge to bootstrap your epistemic rationality—and if akrasia prevents you from ever learning this, then it has directly harmed your epistemic rationality, too.”
“If you know akrasia harms you significantly, and you don’t make solving this problem your high priority, you are not even epistemically rational!”
More like, “If you know akrasia harms you significantly, and you don’t make solving this problem your high priority, then it doesn’t matter if you are epistemically rational because it’s not helping you be (instrumentally) rational.”
“Rationality” by itself should refer to instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality is tool of instrumental rationality. Despite these concepts being described as different adjectives modifying the same noun, it is suboptimal to think of them as different aspects of the same category. Epistemic rationality belongs in a category with other tools of rationality, such as actually choosing what you know you should choose.
After careful reading, my understanding is that DanielLC is saying:
“Akrasia generally harms your instrumental rationality only. Except that you need some basic knowledge to bootstrap your epistemic rationality—and if akrasia prevents you from ever learning this, then it has directly harmed your epistemic rationality, too.”
as a reply to JGWeissman saying:
“If you know akrasia harms you significantly, and you don’t make solving this problem your high priority, you are not even epistemically rational!”
Which, by the way, made me realize that I really am not epistemically rational enough. :(
More like, “If you know akrasia harms you significantly, and you don’t make solving this problem your high priority, then it doesn’t matter if you are epistemically rational because it’s not helping you be (instrumentally) rational.”
“Rationality” by itself should refer to instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality is tool of instrumental rationality. Despite these concepts being described as different adjectives modifying the same noun, it is suboptimal to think of them as different aspects of the same category. Epistemic rationality belongs in a category with other tools of rationality, such as actually choosing what you know you should choose.