I am wary of excluding work ethic and mastery over akrasia from rationality, and I am not sure about intelligence.
Akrasia and work ethic are choices. Aspiring rationalists who find themselves not making the choices they have found to be rational should seek to remedy this situation, not excuse themselves for having akrasia.
Some limitations on how rational you can be might be unfair, but that doesn’t stop them from making you irrational.
The problem with this is that multiple motivation systems contribute to action, and only one of them looks anything like “do the thing I expect will achieve my goals given what I believe about the world.” For example, I wouldn’t call a blind reflex a “choice” or “decision.”
Still, I think it’s useful to ask if the whole person, with all the their motivation systems, is rational. Asking if a person’s subsystems are rational seems relevant when you are figuring out to focus your training efforts on those systems most holding the person back.
A blind reflex may not itself be rational or irrational, but I can train my reflexes, and make rational choices about what I want to train my reflexes to do. Of course, I can only train reflexes to follow simple heuristics far short of computing a rational decision, and that is an “unfair” limit on my rationality, but that doesn’t mean that a system that makes better choices isn’t more rational than me.
The cogsci notion of rationality is indeed a personal rather than a subpersonal one. I’m not trying to describe subprocesses as rational or irrational, though. I’m describing the whole person as rational or irrational, but rationality is an ideal standard for choices, not actions, and reflexes are not “choices.” In any case, I can’t find a sentence in your latest comment that I disagree with.
I think it’s appropriate to separate work ethic and akrasia mastery from rationality. Saying that work ethic is a choice is, imho, a relatively simplistic view. People often get fired for something trivial (smoking when a drug test is coming up, repeated absence, etc) that they know full well is a suboptimal decision and the short term benefits of getting high (or whatever) override their concern for the long term possible consequences. I think it makes sense to make some distinction that rationality is the ability to select the right path to walk and self discipline is the wherewithal to walk it.
I wonder how well defined “my goals” are here or how much to trust expectations. I think a rough approximation could involve these various systems generating some impulse map and then OPFC and some other structures get involved in selecting an action. I don’t think a closed form expression of a goal is required in order to say that the goal exists.
The definitions I’ve seen on here are (paraphrased):
Epistemic Rationality: Ability to find truth in a wide variety of environments
Instrumental Rationality: Ability to alter reality to fit your desires in a wide variety of environments
Work ethic and akrasia are part of epistemic rationality, in that they affect your ability to find the truth, but once you figure out what you need to do, any akrasia in actually doing it is strictly instrumental.
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.
I am wary of excluding work ethic and mastery over akrasia from rationality, and I am not sure about intelligence.
Akrasia and work ethic are choices. Aspiring rationalists who find themselves not making the choices they have found to be rational should seek to remedy this situation, not excuse themselves for having akrasia.
Some limitations on how rational you can be might be unfair, but that doesn’t stop them from making you irrational.
The problem with this is that multiple motivation systems contribute to action, and only one of them looks anything like “do the thing I expect will achieve my goals given what I believe about the world.” For example, I wouldn’t call a blind reflex a “choice” or “decision.”
Still, I think it’s useful to ask if the whole person, with all the their motivation systems, is rational. Asking if a person’s subsystems are rational seems relevant when you are figuring out to focus your training efforts on those systems most holding the person back.
A blind reflex may not itself be rational or irrational, but I can train my reflexes, and make rational choices about what I want to train my reflexes to do. Of course, I can only train reflexes to follow simple heuristics far short of computing a rational decision, and that is an “unfair” limit on my rationality, but that doesn’t mean that a system that makes better choices isn’t more rational than me.
The cogsci notion of rationality is indeed a personal rather than a subpersonal one. I’m not trying to describe subprocesses as rational or irrational, though. I’m describing the whole person as rational or irrational, but rationality is an ideal standard for choices, not actions, and reflexes are not “choices.” In any case, I can’t find a sentence in your latest comment that I disagree with.
I think it’s appropriate to separate work ethic and akrasia mastery from rationality. Saying that work ethic is a choice is, imho, a relatively simplistic view. People often get fired for something trivial (smoking when a drug test is coming up, repeated absence, etc) that they know full well is a suboptimal decision and the short term benefits of getting high (or whatever) override their concern for the long term possible consequences. I think it makes sense to make some distinction that rationality is the ability to select the right path to walk and self discipline is the wherewithal to walk it.
I wonder how well defined “my goals” are here or how much to trust expectations. I think a rough approximation could involve these various systems generating some impulse map and then OPFC and some other structures get involved in selecting an action. I don’t think a closed form expression of a goal is required in order to say that the goal exists.
The definitions I’ve seen on here are (paraphrased):
Epistemic Rationality: Ability to find truth in a wide variety of environments
Instrumental Rationality: Ability to alter reality to fit your desires in a wide variety of environments
Work ethic and akrasia are part of epistemic rationality, in that they affect your ability to find the truth, but once you figure out what you need to do, any akrasia in actually doing it is strictly instrumental.
I may be misreading this, but it seems to me that you inverted the meaning of akrasia.
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.
Fixed.
I know what it means; I just wrote the sentence wrong.
Whoops. Fixed.
I know what it means, I just typed it wrong.
Whoops. Fixed.
I know what it means, I just typed it wrong.