What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee? Drive a car? Raise a child? Conduct a particle physics experiment? You will notice that the unifying feature among these examples is that there is no unifying feature among these examples.
Um, yes there is. In all cases, the rational way is the way that produces predictably suitable results relative to your desired level of utility and/or investment for that result. And in general, the procedures you use will be defined by testing according to some predefined criteria, after being generated through creative and/or problem-solving processes.
And that, more or less, is the skillset (or at least the rough scope of such a skillset) of instrumental rationality.
You do not need academic-grade rationality every second of the day and you do not need to pretend that you are the only rational person in the world.
Agreed.
In order to live rationally and live well, we must have easy access to organised expert domain knowledge in useful areas such as self-motivation, health and fitness, development of social skills, use of technology
But if you don’t know how to hypothesize, measure, and test, you have no way to sort that domain knowledge for usefulness to you.
and of course, the abstract rules of epistemic rationality.
the rational way is the way that produces predictably suitable results relative to your desired level of utility and/or investment for that result.
I apologise, but is there some simpler way for you to express this? I do not understand what it means. If you stated it in terms of real-life thoughts, actions and problems I might grasp it better.
the procedures you use will be defined by testing according to some predefined criteria, after being generated through creative and/or problem-solving processes.
Again, is there some simpler way to express this? Who generated the procedures? Was it me or someone else? How are the procedures defined by the testing criteria? Surely a procedure is a sequence of steps toward some goal, and does not have a definition.
And that, more or less, is the skillset (or at least the rough scope of such a skillset) of instrumental rationality.
I remain hopelessly unenlightened.
What are these, exactly?
Logical fallacies, bayes theorem, working knowledge of the scientific method and knowledge of heuristics and biases.
Concretely: I wish my toast to be buttered (let’s leave aside for now why I have this desire and if it is rational). Innate, largely unconscious instrumental human rationality (the process by which we inductively learn how to behave in the world) has already equipped me with a way to achieve my goal: apply butter to knife, apply buttered knife to toast. If this toast-buttering strategy achieves the desired outcome in a relatively short amount of time and to a satisfactory quality level then I am being perfectly rational in not pursuing the issue further. I’m achieving predictably (repeatable on many trials) suitable (meeting my goals satisfactorily) results relative to my desired level of utility (buttered toast in my belly is a small but detectable increase in utility) and/or investment for that result (I don’t want to invest too much time in trying to optimize my toast buttering due to my estimate of the cost/benefit of further time investment in so doing).
It is possible that the simple procedure above does not meet my goals. Perhaps I am frustrated by the fact that the cold butter from the fridge tends to destroy the surface of the toast and also fails to spread adequately, thus lowering the utility I gain from buttered toast consumption. Perhaps I work in a cafe serving English breakfast and I find myself spending a large amount of time buttering toast and desire a more efficient bulk toast-buttering technique. In either case the basic principles of rationality could be brought to bear to improve my results, if my estimate was that the time investment of attempting improvements would be justified by my expected increase in utility.
Thankyou, Matt. This takes us to the heart of the matter.
largely unconscious instrumental human rationality has already equipped me with a way to achieve my goal: apply butter to knife, apply buttered knife to toast.
Isn’t this a completely ludicrous example of “rationality”? What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”! Is “rationality” just a universal signifier for “doing stuff right”? The word has been stretched beyond all meaning! You may rationally believe that particular way of buttering the toast is the correct way, but this is an example of epistemic rationality. There is no need to invoke the non-concept of instrumental rationality.
I’m achieving predictably (repeatable on many trials) suitable (meeting my goals satisfactorily) results relative to my desired level of utility (buttered toast in my belly is a small but detectable increase in utility)
I’ll be honest with you, I have never detected utility in my belly. I know this is tangenital, but the concept of utility just does not seem at all useful. How do we calibrate this unit of measurement? Or is it simply an abstraction? I can see how that might be useful in an abstract discussion, but in this case why not refer directly to the actual feelings felt? Saying that you “increased utility” is pointless jargon, and its use contributes to the kind of confused word-salad which occasionally appears in these sorts of discussions.
[...] In either case the basic principles of rationality could be brought to bear to improve my results, if my estimate was that the time investment of attempting improvements would be justified by my expected increase in utility.
Here’s the crux of it. Your improvements will make use of the standard tools of epistemic rationality, the scientific method and all the rest of it. There is no seperate world of instrumental rationality. At best “instrumental rationality” may be defined as epistemic rationality applied to the problem of choosing among methods for achieving a goal, a rather weak and pointless category. The actual methods themselves are emphatically not a form of rationality.
What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”! Is “rationality” just a universal signifier for “doing stuff right”?
No, instrumental rationality is the meta-process you apply to choosing or refining the primary process (i.e., the actual toast-buttering).
If you look carefully at the original statement that I made, you’ll find that there are a large number of places where people fail at instrumental rationality:
Failing to establish success criteria in advance
Failing to determine desired/feasible levels of investment
Failing to test
Failing to generate alternatives
Failure to apply creativity
Failure to apply problem-solving
And these are just the failures you can generate by a literal reading of my statement, without addressing things like failures within each of these areas, like failure to establish a baseline for testing, etc.
These are all ways in which I’ve seen large, expensive, real-world projects fail… and a lot of people in the business world will nonetheless look at you funny when you ask questions like, “so, how will this make the company money?”
(And a small minority, thank heaven, will think you’re a genius (or recognize a fellow-traveler) and start bringing you in to ask these kinds of questions sooner in the process.)
Isn’t this a completely ludicrous example of “rationality”? What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”!
The rationality I was referring to wasn’t the rational control of the muscles. It was the rational belief that applying butter to knife and buttered knife to toast would result in buttered toast. I’m thinking of my favourite rebuke to the claim that “there are no atheists in a foxhole”: “Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as any one else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.”.
Our ‘common sense’ knowledge of the world is grounded in a basic rationalism. How could it be otherwise, given that rationality is ‘that process of thinking that delivers correct answers’? It has been empirically demonstrated that our rationality is flawed and limited however. I understand the term ‘instrumental rationality’ to mean simply the conscious application of the principles or rationality to achieving better results in the mundane business of everyday existence. Understanding where innate unthinking rationality fails is perhaps the most important step to improving our outcomes.
A practical distinction that is suggested to me by the term ‘instrumental rationality’ is the emphasis on only being as rational as is justified by the circumstances. It would be irrational to perform a full cost benefit analysis on toast buttering given that my current technique achieves acceptable results with minimal effort.
I’ll be honest with you, I have never detected utility in my belly.
Then I don’t think you’ve really understood the concept of utility. Rationality has had the most practical benefits for me when applied to achieving outcomes whose utility I can ‘feel in my belly’. I can’t perfectly calibrate a unit of measurement but by attempting to weigh up the relative utilities of different outcomes and let estimates of expected values of different choices influence my thinking I find I can usefully improve my decisions. That is really what I mean by ‘instrumental rationality’ - something less formal than full blown x-rationality but more conscious than the rationality which comes naturally and without thinking.
Here’s the crux of it. Your improvements will make use of the standard tools of epistemic rationality, the scientific method and all the rest of it.
Informed by but not identical with. I find the distinction useful. There are many decisions I have to make that do not justify the investment of resources required to perform a rigorous analysis but that seem to me to benefit from an effort to informally apply principles of rationality that (I feel but cannot rigorously prove) make me less wrong than I would be if I did not make a conscious effort to apply them.
One of the key (informal, non-rigorous) insights for me from Bayes’ Theorem is that it is perfectly rational to make best guesses derived from many uncertain inputs. There is no need to be certain of any of your premises to make decisions that are still the best decision you can make given the context.
Isn’t this a completely ludicrous example of “rationality”? What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”! Is “rationality” just a universal signifier for “doing stuff right”? The word has been stretched beyond all meaning! You may rationally believe that particular way of buttering the toast is the correct way, but this is an example of epistemic rationality. There is no need to invoke the non-concept of instrumental rationality.
If one attempts to butter their toast by first rubbing the clean knife on the toast and then buttering the knife afterwards, I would not hesitate to describe this as an instrumentally irrational procedure for buttering toast.
It is likely that many people, faced with real-life tasks more complicated than buttering toast, do in fact apply methods abstractly resembling this alternate approach to toast-buttering.
You may rationally believe that particular way of buttering the toast is the correct way, but this is an example of epistemic rationality.
He said that particular way of buttering toast was a rational way, not the rational way. There are other ways of buttering toast which may be rational, such as dipping it in liquefied butter or hiring a chef to do it for you.
He said that particular way of buttering toast was a rational way, not the rational way. There are other ways of buttering toast which may be rational, such as dipping it in liquefied butter or hiring a chef to do it for you.
Or perhaps you enjoy inventing complicated gadgets, in which case you might build an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to do it for you.
That’s the beauty of instrumental rationalism… we aren’t constrained by the silly, petty notion that there’s only ONE “correct” way to do something. ;-)
Who generated the procedures? Was it me or someone else? How are the procedures defined by the testing criteria? Surely a procedure is a sequence of steps toward some goal, and does not have a definition.
mattnewport has already answered the rest, so I’ll just fill in this bit. What I said was:
And in general, the procedures you use will be defined by testing according to some predefined criteria, after being generated through creative and/or problem-solving processes.
Meaning, “the procedures you use” (e.g. for toast-buttering) “will be defined” (i.e., determined, circumscribed, narrowed, filtered, specified) “by testing” (to determine suitability) “according to some predefined criteria” (i.e., your criteria for what a successful result would consist of) “after being generated” (i.e., first you generate procedures, then you test them), “through creative and/or problem-solving processes” (i.e., either you generate improvements on, alternatives to, or solutions for problems in an existing procedure, borrow a procedure from someone else, or attempt to invent or derive one from scratch.)
Um, yes there is. In all cases, the rational way is the way that produces predictably suitable results relative to your desired level of utility and/or investment for that result. And in general, the procedures you use will be defined by testing according to some predefined criteria, after being generated through creative and/or problem-solving processes.
And that, more or less, is the skillset (or at least the rough scope of such a skillset) of instrumental rationality.
Agreed.
But if you don’t know how to hypothesize, measure, and test, you have no way to sort that domain knowledge for usefulness to you.
What are these, exactly?
I apologise, but is there some simpler way for you to express this? I do not understand what it means. If you stated it in terms of real-life thoughts, actions and problems I might grasp it better.
Again, is there some simpler way to express this? Who generated the procedures? Was it me or someone else? How are the procedures defined by the testing criteria? Surely a procedure is a sequence of steps toward some goal, and does not have a definition.
I remain hopelessly unenlightened.
Logical fallacies, bayes theorem, working knowledge of the scientific method and knowledge of heuristics and biases.
Concretely: I wish my toast to be buttered (let’s leave aside for now why I have this desire and if it is rational). Innate, largely unconscious instrumental human rationality (the process by which we inductively learn how to behave in the world) has already equipped me with a way to achieve my goal: apply butter to knife, apply buttered knife to toast. If this toast-buttering strategy achieves the desired outcome in a relatively short amount of time and to a satisfactory quality level then I am being perfectly rational in not pursuing the issue further. I’m achieving predictably (repeatable on many trials) suitable (meeting my goals satisfactorily) results relative to my desired level of utility (buttered toast in my belly is a small but detectable increase in utility) and/or investment for that result (I don’t want to invest too much time in trying to optimize my toast buttering due to my estimate of the cost/benefit of further time investment in so doing).
It is possible that the simple procedure above does not meet my goals. Perhaps I am frustrated by the fact that the cold butter from the fridge tends to destroy the surface of the toast and also fails to spread adequately, thus lowering the utility I gain from buttered toast consumption. Perhaps I work in a cafe serving English breakfast and I find myself spending a large amount of time buttering toast and desire a more efficient bulk toast-buttering technique. In either case the basic principles of rationality could be brought to bear to improve my results, if my estimate was that the time investment of attempting improvements would be justified by my expected increase in utility.
Thankyou, Matt. This takes us to the heart of the matter.
Isn’t this a completely ludicrous example of “rationality”? What does “rationality” signify in this case? Unconsious co-ordination and control of the senses and muscles? That is not what I, or any sane person, understands by the word “rationality”! Is “rationality” just a universal signifier for “doing stuff right”? The word has been stretched beyond all meaning! You may rationally believe that particular way of buttering the toast is the correct way, but this is an example of epistemic rationality. There is no need to invoke the non-concept of instrumental rationality.
I’ll be honest with you, I have never detected utility in my belly. I know this is tangenital, but the concept of utility just does not seem at all useful. How do we calibrate this unit of measurement? Or is it simply an abstraction? I can see how that might be useful in an abstract discussion, but in this case why not refer directly to the actual feelings felt? Saying that you “increased utility” is pointless jargon, and its use contributes to the kind of confused word-salad which occasionally appears in these sorts of discussions.
Here’s the crux of it. Your improvements will make use of the standard tools of epistemic rationality, the scientific method and all the rest of it. There is no seperate world of instrumental rationality. At best “instrumental rationality” may be defined as epistemic rationality applied to the problem of choosing among methods for achieving a goal, a rather weak and pointless category. The actual methods themselves are emphatically not a form of rationality.
No, instrumental rationality is the meta-process you apply to choosing or refining the primary process (i.e., the actual toast-buttering).
If you look carefully at the original statement that I made, you’ll find that there are a large number of places where people fail at instrumental rationality:
Failing to establish success criteria in advance
Failing to determine desired/feasible levels of investment
Failing to test
Failing to generate alternatives
Failure to apply creativity
Failure to apply problem-solving
And these are just the failures you can generate by a literal reading of my statement, without addressing things like failures within each of these areas, like failure to establish a baseline for testing, etc.
These are all ways in which I’ve seen large, expensive, real-world projects fail… and a lot of people in the business world will nonetheless look at you funny when you ask questions like, “so, how will this make the company money?”
(And a small minority, thank heaven, will think you’re a genius (or recognize a fellow-traveler) and start bringing you in to ask these kinds of questions sooner in the process.)
The rationality I was referring to wasn’t the rational control of the muscles. It was the rational belief that applying butter to knife and buttered knife to toast would result in buttered toast. I’m thinking of my favourite rebuke to the claim that “there are no atheists in a foxhole”: “Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as any one else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.”.
Our ‘common sense’ knowledge of the world is grounded in a basic rationalism. How could it be otherwise, given that rationality is ‘that process of thinking that delivers correct answers’? It has been empirically demonstrated that our rationality is flawed and limited however. I understand the term ‘instrumental rationality’ to mean simply the conscious application of the principles or rationality to achieving better results in the mundane business of everyday existence. Understanding where innate unthinking rationality fails is perhaps the most important step to improving our outcomes.
A practical distinction that is suggested to me by the term ‘instrumental rationality’ is the emphasis on only being as rational as is justified by the circumstances. It would be irrational to perform a full cost benefit analysis on toast buttering given that my current technique achieves acceptable results with minimal effort.
Then I don’t think you’ve really understood the concept of utility. Rationality has had the most practical benefits for me when applied to achieving outcomes whose utility I can ‘feel in my belly’. I can’t perfectly calibrate a unit of measurement but by attempting to weigh up the relative utilities of different outcomes and let estimates of expected values of different choices influence my thinking I find I can usefully improve my decisions. That is really what I mean by ‘instrumental rationality’ - something less formal than full blown x-rationality but more conscious than the rationality which comes naturally and without thinking.
Informed by but not identical with. I find the distinction useful. There are many decisions I have to make that do not justify the investment of resources required to perform a rigorous analysis but that seem to me to benefit from an effort to informally apply principles of rationality that (I feel but cannot rigorously prove) make me less wrong than I would be if I did not make a conscious effort to apply them.
One of the key (informal, non-rigorous) insights for me from Bayes’ Theorem is that it is perfectly rational to make best guesses derived from many uncertain inputs. There is no need to be certain of any of your premises to make decisions that are still the best decision you can make given the context.
If one attempts to butter their toast by first rubbing the clean knife on the toast and then buttering the knife afterwards, I would not hesitate to describe this as an instrumentally irrational procedure for buttering toast.
It is likely that many people, faced with real-life tasks more complicated than buttering toast, do in fact apply methods abstractly resembling this alternate approach to toast-buttering.
He said that particular way of buttering toast was a rational way, not the rational way. There are other ways of buttering toast which may be rational, such as dipping it in liquefied butter or hiring a chef to do it for you.
Or perhaps you enjoy inventing complicated gadgets, in which case you might build an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to do it for you.
That’s the beauty of instrumental rationalism… we aren’t constrained by the silly, petty notion that there’s only ONE “correct” way to do something. ;-)
mattnewport has already answered the rest, so I’ll just fill in this bit. What I said was:
Meaning, “the procedures you use” (e.g. for toast-buttering) “will be defined” (i.e., determined, circumscribed, narrowed, filtered, specified) “by testing” (to determine suitability) “according to some predefined criteria” (i.e., your criteria for what a successful result would consist of) “after being generated” (i.e., first you generate procedures, then you test them), “through creative and/or problem-solving processes” (i.e., either you generate improvements on, alternatives to, or solutions for problems in an existing procedure, borrow a procedure from someone else, or attempt to invent or derive one from scratch.)