They show me whether or how I’ve changed my mind. When I started participating here heavily, I used Spotlight to ask my past selves how they’d felt over time about “rationality”, because my initial reaction was that LW was a strange place to find myself in, for a critic of rationality—as I then (2009) thought of myself.
I was led for instance to a 2001 email conversation about the definition Rawls gives of rationality in his Theory of Justice, to this 2004 blog entry, shortly followed by a book proposal to my editor in an IT-related journal about rational processes in software engineering (very brief excerpt: “rational behavior is that which achieves our ends; rational behavior fits the world as it really is”). Then my email records show me dropping the term altogether—I didn’t use it on a single occasion until very recently. (The book didn’t pan out.)
This little look in the rearview mirror was useful in assessing my motivations in participating here. “Rationality” is too easy an applause light, calling people “irrational” too much of an accusation, for me not to question why I should take an interest in Less Wrong. Spotting the words I quote above showed me that my definition of the term tracked with how it’s used here, and my recollection of previous thinking, such as the 2004 blog entry, told me that what I’d been objecting to all this while is the oversimplifying (e.g. Cartesian) connotations of the term, and so I made peace with my past selves as I walked into this rationalist trap. ;)
(ETA: In a sense these records are just part of my outboard brain, same as the iPhone. I’m with you in thinking this is one of the things Stross gets right about the future, the self gets more distributed in space.)
They show me whether or how I’ve changed my mind. When I started participating here heavily, I used Spotlight to ask my past selves how they’d felt over time about “rationality”, because my initial reaction was that LW was a strange place to find myself in, for a critic of rationality—as I then (2009) thought of myself.
I was led for instance to a 2001 email conversation about the definition Rawls gives of rationality in his Theory of Justice, to this 2004 blog entry, shortly followed by a book proposal to my editor in an IT-related journal about rational processes in software engineering (very brief excerpt: “rational behavior is that which achieves our ends; rational behavior fits the world as it really is”). Then my email records show me dropping the term altogether—I didn’t use it on a single occasion until very recently. (The book didn’t pan out.)
This little look in the rearview mirror was useful in assessing my motivations in participating here. “Rationality” is too easy an applause light, calling people “irrational” too much of an accusation, for me not to question why I should take an interest in Less Wrong. Spotting the words I quote above showed me that my definition of the term tracked with how it’s used here, and my recollection of previous thinking, such as the 2004 blog entry, told me that what I’d been objecting to all this while is the oversimplifying (e.g. Cartesian) connotations of the term, and so I made peace with my past selves as I walked into this rationalist trap. ;)
(ETA: In a sense these records are just part of my outboard brain, same as the iPhone. I’m with you in thinking this is one of the things Stross gets right about the future, the self gets more distributed in space.)