First, let me say I 100% agree with the idea that there is a problem in the rationality community of viewing rationality as something like momentum or gold (I named my blog rejectingrationality after this phenomena and tried to deal with it in my first post).
However, I’m not totally sure everything you say falls under that concept. In particular, I’d say that rationality realism is something like the belief that there is a fact of the matter about how best to form beliefs or take actions in response to a particular set of experiences and that many facts about this (going far beyond don’t be dutch booked). With the frequent additional belief that what is rational to do in response to various kind of experiences can be inferred by a priori considerations, e.g., think about all the ways that rule X might lead you wrong in certain possible situations so X can’t be rational.
When I’ve raised this issue in the past the response I’ve gotten from both Yudkowsky and Hanson is: “But of course we can try to be less wrong,” i.e., have less false beliefs. And of course that is true but that’s a very different notion than the notion of rationality used by rationality realists and misses the way that much of the rationality’s community’s talk about rationality isn’t about literally being less wrong but about classify rules for reaching beliefs into rational and irrational even when they don’t disagree in the actual world.
In particular, if all I’m doing is analyzing how to be less wrong I can’t criticize people who dogmatically believe things that happen to be true. After all, if god does exist, than dogmatically believing he does makes the people who do less wrong. Similarly the various critiques of human psychological dispositions as leading us to make wrong choices in some kinds of cases isn’t sufficient if those cases are rare and cases where it yields better results are common. However, those who are rationality realists suggest that there is some fact of the matter which makes these belief forming strategies irrational and thus appropriate to eschew and criticize. But, ultimately, aside from merely avoiding getting dutch booked, no rule for belief forming can assure it is less wrong than another in all possible worlds.
First, let me say I 100% agree with the idea that there is a problem in the rationality community of viewing rationality as something like momentum or gold (I named my blog rejectingrationality after this phenomena and tried to deal with it in my first post).
However, I’m not totally sure everything you say falls under that concept. In particular, I’d say that rationality realism is something like the belief that there is a fact of the matter about how best to form beliefs or take actions in response to a particular set of experiences and that many facts about this (going far beyond don’t be dutch booked). With the frequent additional belief that what is rational to do in response to various kind of experiences can be inferred by a priori considerations, e.g., think about all the ways that rule X might lead you wrong in certain possible situations so X can’t be rational.
When I’ve raised this issue in the past the response I’ve gotten from both Yudkowsky and Hanson is: “But of course we can try to be less wrong,” i.e., have less false beliefs. And of course that is true but that’s a very different notion than the notion of rationality used by rationality realists and misses the way that much of the rationality’s community’s talk about rationality isn’t about literally being less wrong but about classify rules for reaching beliefs into rational and irrational even when they don’t disagree in the actual world.
In particular, if all I’m doing is analyzing how to be less wrong I can’t criticize people who dogmatically believe things that happen to be true. After all, if god does exist, than dogmatically believing he does makes the people who do less wrong. Similarly the various critiques of human psychological dispositions as leading us to make wrong choices in some kinds of cases isn’t sufficient if those cases are rare and cases where it yields better results are common. However, those who are rationality realists suggest that there is some fact of the matter which makes these belief forming strategies irrational and thus appropriate to eschew and criticize. But, ultimately, aside from merely avoiding getting dutch booked, no rule for belief forming can assure it is less wrong than another in all possible worlds.