So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational. Hopefully commenting on my own comment won’t discourage others from doing so.
I’m not wary because I’m afraid my newfound insight is going to be damaged somehow; quite the contrary. I’m wary because I strongly fear that all these rationalist arguments will be very seductive. However, I’ve tried very hard my whole life (with varying degrees of success) to make sure my thoughts and ideas were my own, and, having so recently stepped back into the light, I fear I might be very susceptible to rationalist arguments. “But that’s a good thing,” you might say, “because it’s rationalism!” (or rather, some more complicated and convincing formulation). Well, sure, but that doesn’t make any specific rationalist argument certain to be right, and I’m not sure I feel competent to evaluate the truth of claims that sound very good and I really want to believe right now.
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational.
You might like a couple of pieces that take a similarly positive-but-tempered view of LW-style rationality (both written by the person — Yvain — who wrote the piece at your link, as it happens): “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great” and “Epistemic learned helplessness”. You might also like Yvain’s other LW posts, most of which work as standalone pieces and are worth reading.
Wow. Thank you. I just finished “Epistemic Learned Helplessness,” and I feel much better now. Those two articles have successfully inoculated me against being sucked in too easily into the “x-rationalist” view.
I actually disagree with what he says in “Epistemic Learned Helplessness”; or rather, I don’t believe that that helplessness is actually necessary, that I can—or if I can’t, it is possible to with sufficient training—tell when a case has been reasonably proven and when I should suspend judgement. Or maybe he’s more right than I like to admit; I have to concede that I was taken in by much of Graham Hancock’s work until I tried to write a short story based on one of his ideas and it completely fell apart after some research and analysis. But regardless of whether the dilemma he poses is avoidable or not, he makes some excellent, indeed critical, points, and I can now proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism of rationalism, a phrase I would likely have been ashamed to utter before reading that article.
Okay, I’ve read the first article you linked, and I’m discovering that I was naive about what this site was about (this should not be surprising after all the times similar things have happened to me, but it apparently still is). I’ve read HPMOR, of course, but I didn’t catch on that this site would be specifically geared to using specific, formal, scientifically-derived techniques to improve thinking. The article mentioned Scientology; this kind of sounds a little like Scientology (well, Dianetics) to me, though I’m sure it makes much more formal sense. This makes me still more wary than before; I like my own “organic” rationalist methods, and am skittish of adopting some formal “system” of thought. This is more grousing than complaint; I do not have enough information to intelligently critique at this point, although the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something. This does not mean that reading about common errors in thinking couldn’t be useful.
I’m disappointed that my post didn’t receive more response (poor me! I want attention! Well, alright, I was hoping for something analogous to a support group), but I appreciate yours. I’ll definitely keep reading.
the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something.
I can’t speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven’t read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.
The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they’re already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don’t work, so obviously bad methods get forgotten about and become unfamiliar again. The more interesting reason is that using a method makes it “better”: practice allows you to apply it more quickly when it’s relevant, you learn to recognize more quickly the situations where the method’s relevant, and you get better at integrating what you learn from that method with your other thoughts.
This is why it can be safer to organically accrete a system of thinking piece by piece than to install a fully-fledged system in one go; you only have to keep one piece in your head at a time, and you can focus on that one piece for a while until you’re used to it and can apply it without much conscious effort. By contrast, trying to take on a complete system in one go means you’re constantly having to think hard about which parts of it are relevant to each problem you confront. It’s the difference between seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and knowing you need a screwdriver to tighten it, and seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and emptying your toolbox on the floor so you can try each tool one-by-one.
The important distinction isn’t so much between formal methods and organic methods, but between methods you’ve fully internalized and methods you haven’t. A formal method that’s permanently imprinted into your mind through practice is likely to be quicker to use, easier to use, and more effective than an informal method you’ve only just heard about. Eventually, if you practice a technique enough, formal or not, there’s a good chance your brain will automatically reach out and apply it in the normal course of grokking a whole situation organically. (For example, if I need to predict or reason about some recurrent event in my life, I often automatically apply reference class forecasting without much thought, and I readily integrate that information with any other information I can glean about the event.)
So I think it makes sense to take this stuff at whatever pace feels comfortable. Certainly, when I first landed on LW, I didn’t shoot off and read all of the sequences of core posts in one go. I just clicked around, read recent discussions, and when people referred to individual posts in the sequences while discussing other things, I’d click through and read the post they linked to. (And then if I felt like reading more, I’d look at the other posts linked by that post!)
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational. Hopefully commenting on my own comment won’t discourage others from doing so.
I’m not wary because I’m afraid my newfound insight is going to be damaged somehow; quite the contrary. I’m wary because I strongly fear that all these rationalist arguments will be very seductive. However, I’ve tried very hard my whole life (with varying degrees of success) to make sure my thoughts and ideas were my own, and, having so recently stepped back into the light, I fear I might be very susceptible to rationalist arguments. “But that’s a good thing,” you might say, “because it’s rationalism!” (or rather, some more complicated and convincing formulation). Well, sure, but that doesn’t make any specific rationalist argument certain to be right, and I’m not sure I feel competent to evaluate the truth of claims that sound very good and I really want to believe right now.
You might like a couple of pieces that take a similarly positive-but-tempered view of LW-style rationality (both written by the person — Yvain — who wrote the piece at your link, as it happens): “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great” and “Epistemic learned helplessness”. You might also like Yvain’s other LW posts, most of which work as standalone pieces and are worth reading.
Wow. Thank you. I just finished “Epistemic Learned Helplessness,” and I feel much better now. Those two articles have successfully inoculated me against being sucked in too easily into the “x-rationalist” view.
I actually disagree with what he says in “Epistemic Learned Helplessness”; or rather, I don’t believe that that helplessness is actually necessary, that I can—or if I can’t, it is possible to with sufficient training—tell when a case has been reasonably proven and when I should suspend judgement. Or maybe he’s more right than I like to admit; I have to concede that I was taken in by much of Graham Hancock’s work until I tried to write a short story based on one of his ideas and it completely fell apart after some research and analysis. But regardless of whether the dilemma he poses is avoidable or not, he makes some excellent, indeed critical, points, and I can now proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism of rationalism, a phrase I would likely have been ashamed to utter before reading that article.
Okay, I’ve read the first article you linked, and I’m discovering that I was naive about what this site was about (this should not be surprising after all the times similar things have happened to me, but it apparently still is). I’ve read HPMOR, of course, but I didn’t catch on that this site would be specifically geared to using specific, formal, scientifically-derived techniques to improve thinking. The article mentioned Scientology; this kind of sounds a little like Scientology (well, Dianetics) to me, though I’m sure it makes much more formal sense. This makes me still more wary than before; I like my own “organic” rationalist methods, and am skittish of adopting some formal “system” of thought. This is more grousing than complaint; I do not have enough information to intelligently critique at this point, although the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something. This does not mean that reading about common errors in thinking couldn’t be useful.
I’m disappointed that my post didn’t receive more response (poor me! I want attention! Well, alright, I was hoping for something analogous to a support group), but I appreciate yours. I’ll definitely keep reading.
I can’t speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven’t read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.
The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they’re already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don’t work, so obviously bad methods get forgotten about and become unfamiliar again. The more interesting reason is that using a method makes it “better”: practice allows you to apply it more quickly when it’s relevant, you learn to recognize more quickly the situations where the method’s relevant, and you get better at integrating what you learn from that method with your other thoughts.
This is why it can be safer to organically accrete a system of thinking piece by piece than to install a fully-fledged system in one go; you only have to keep one piece in your head at a time, and you can focus on that one piece for a while until you’re used to it and can apply it without much conscious effort. By contrast, trying to take on a complete system in one go means you’re constantly having to think hard about which parts of it are relevant to each problem you confront. It’s the difference between seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and knowing you need a screwdriver to tighten it, and seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and emptying your toolbox on the floor so you can try each tool one-by-one.
The important distinction isn’t so much between formal methods and organic methods, but between methods you’ve fully internalized and methods you haven’t. A formal method that’s permanently imprinted into your mind through practice is likely to be quicker to use, easier to use, and more effective than an informal method you’ve only just heard about. Eventually, if you practice a technique enough, formal or not, there’s a good chance your brain will automatically reach out and apply it in the normal course of grokking a whole situation organically. (For example, if I need to predict or reason about some recurrent event in my life, I often automatically apply reference class forecasting without much thought, and I readily integrate that information with any other information I can glean about the event.)
So I think it makes sense to take this stuff at whatever pace feels comfortable. Certainly, when I first landed on LW, I didn’t shoot off and read all of the sequences of core posts in one go. I just clicked around, read recent discussions, and when people referred to individual posts in the sequences while discussing other things, I’d click through and read the post they linked to. (And then if I felt like reading more, I’d look at the other posts linked by that post!)
Enjoy the site!