I find it useful consider epistemic rationality a subtype of instrumental rationality, and identify other types of instrumental rationality such as social rationality.
So if you understand what concept we are generally getting at with this word “rationality”, and with the sub-terms “epistemic rationality” and “instrumental rationality”, we have communicated: we have accomplished everything there is to accomplish by talking about how to define “rationality”. What’s left to discuss is not what meaning to attach to the syllables “ra-tio-na-li-ty”; what’s left to discuss is what is a good way to think.
With that said, you should be aware that many of us will regard as controversial—at the very least—any construal of “rationality” that makes it non-normative:
For example, if you say, “The rational belief is X, but the true belief is Y” then you are probably using the word “rational” in a way that means something other than what most of us have in mind. (E.g. some of us expect “rationality” to be consistent under reflection—“rationally” looking at the evidence, and “rationally” considering how your mind processes the evidence, shouldn’t lead to two different conclusions.) Similarly, if you find yourself saying “The rational thing to do is X, but the right thing to do is Y” then you are almost certainly using one of the words “rational” or “right” in a way that a huge chunk of readers won’t agree with.
A normative belief in rationality is, as far as I can tell, not possible for someone who does not have a clear concpetion of what rationality is. I am trying to present tools for forming such a conception. The theory I am presenting is, most accurately, a rationally constructed language, not a prescriptive theory on whether it is moral to be rational. The merit of this language is that it should allow you to converse about rationality with mysticists or religious people so that you both understand what you are talking about. It seems to me the ID vs. evolution debate remains unresolved among the general public (in the USA) because neither side has managed to speak the same language as the other side. My language is not formally defined in the sense of being a formal language, but it has formally defined ontological types.
The merit of this language is that it should allow you to converse about rationality with mysticists or religious people so that you both understand what you are talking about.
I think the most you can hope for is a model of rationality and irrationality that can model mysticists or religious people as well as rationalists. I don’t think you can expect everyone to grok that model. That model may not be expressible in a mysticist’s model of reality.
How can we differentiate the irrational from the rational, if we do not know what the irrational is?
Irrationality is just less instrumentally rational—less likely to win. You seem to have split rational and irrational into two categories, and I think this is just a methodological mistake. To understand and compare the two, you need to put both on the same scale, and then show how they have different measures on that scale.
Also, now that I look at more of your responses, it seems that you have your own highly developed theory, with your own highly developed language, and you’re speaking that language to us. We don’t speak your language. If you’re going to try to talk to people in a new language, you need to start simple, like “this is a ball”, so that we have some meaningful context from which to understand “I hit the ball.”
Quickly thereafter, you have to demonstrate, and not just assert, some value to your language to motivate any readers you have to continue learning your language.
I think the most you can hope for is a model of rationality and irrationality that can model mysticists or religious people as well as rationalists. I don’t think you can expect everyone to grok that model. That model may not be expressible in a mysticist’s model of reality.
Agree. The Pirahã could not use my model because abstract concepts are banned in their culture. I read from New Scientist that white man tried to teach them numbers so that they wouldn’t be cheated in trade so much, but upon getting some insight of what a number is, they refused to think that way. The analytic Metaphysics of Quality (my theory) would say that the Pirahã do not use transcendental language. They somehow know what it is and avoid it despite not having a name for it in their language. That language has only a few words.
The point is not to have everyone to grok at this model, but to use this model to explain reality. The differences between the concepts of “abstract” and “concrete” have been difficult to sort out by philosophers, but in this case the Pirahã behavior seems to be adequately explicable by using the concepts of “natural quality” and “transcendental quality” in the analytic Metaphysics of Quality.
Irrationality is just less instrumentally rational—less likely to win. You seem to have split rational and irrational into two categories, and I think this is just a methodological mistake. To understand and compare the two, you need to put both on the same scale, and then show how they have different measures on that scale.
Do you mean by “irrationality” something like a biased way of thinking whose existence can be objectively determined? I don’t mean that by irrationality. I mean things whose existence has no rational justification, such as stream of consciousness. Things like dreams. If you are in a dream, and open your (working) wrist watch, and find out it contains coins instead of clockwork, and behave as if that were normal, there is no rational justification for you doing so—at least none that you know of while seeing the dream.
Also, now that I look at more of your responses, it seems that you have your own highly developed theory, with your own highly developed language, and you’re speaking that language to us. We don’t speak your language. If you’re going to try to talk to people in a new language, you need to start simple, like “this is a ball”, so that we have some meaningful context from which to understand “I hit the ball.”
You’re perfectly right. I’d like to go for the dialogue option, but obviously, if it’s too exhausting for you because my point of view is too remote, nobody will participate. That’s all I’m offering right now, though—dialogue. Maybe something else later, maybe not. I’ve had some fun already despite losing a lot of “karma”.
The problem with simple examples is that, for example, I’d have to start a discussion on what is “useful”. It seems to me the question is almost the same as “What is Quality?” The Metaphysics of Quality insists that Quality is undefinable. Although I’ve noticed some on LW have liked Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it seems this would already cause a debate in its own right. I’d prefer not to get stuck on that debate and risk missing the chance of saying what I actually wanted to say.
If that discussion, however, is necessary, then I’d like to point out irrational behavior, that is, a somewhat uncritical habit of doing the first thing that pops into my mind, has been very useful for me. It has improved my efficiency in doing things I could rationally justify despite not actually performing the justification except rarely. If I am behaving that way—without keeping any justifications in my mind—I would say I am operating in the subjective or mystical continuum. When I do produce the justification, I do it in the objective or normative continuum by having either one of those emerge from the earlier subjective or mystical continuum via strong emergence. But I am not being rational before I have done this in spite of ending up with results that later appear rationally good.
EDIT: Moved this post here upon finding out that I can reply to this comment. This 10 minute lag is pretty inconvenient.
It seems to me the ID vs. evolution debate remains unresolved among the general public (in the USA) because neither side has managed to speak the same language as the other side.
If neither side accepts the other side’s language as meaningful, why do you believe they would accept the new language?
That’s a very good point. Gonna give you +1 on that. The language, or type system, I am offering has the merit of no such type system being devised before. I stick to this unless proven wrong.
Academic philosophy has it’s good sides. “Vagrant predicates” by Rescher are an impressive and pretty recent invention. I also like confirmation holism. But as far as I know, nobody has tried to do an ontology with the following features:
Is analytically defined
Explains both strong and weak emergence
Precision of conceptual differentiation can be expanded arbitrarily (in this case by splitting continua into a greater amount of levels)
Includes its own incompleteness as a non-well-formed set (Dynamic Quality)
Uses an assumption of symmetry to figure out the contents and structure of irrational ontological categories which are inherently unable to account for their structure, with no apparent problems
Once you grasp the scope of this theory I don’t think you’ll find a simpler theory to include all that meaningfully—but please do tell me if you do. I still think my theory is relatively simple when compared to quantum mechanics, except that it has a broad scope.
In any case, the point is that on a closer look it appears that my theory has no viable competition, hence, it is the first standard and not the 15th. No other ontology attempts to cover this broad a scope into a formal model.
ID vs. evolution debate remains unresolved among the general public (in the USA) because neither side has managed to speak the same language as the other side
Those are the labels used to describe the issue by the participants. But taking an outside view, the issue is inconsistent principles between the two sides. The fact that true religious believers reject the need for beliefs to pay rent in anticipated experience won’t be solved by new vocabulary.
As luck would have it, I always land on the following page when I start typing “less...” in my browser. http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/
I find it useful consider epistemic rationality a subtype of instrumental rationality, and identify other types of instrumental rationality such as social rationality.
EDIT: I went on about this recently in: http://lesswrong.com/lw/eqn/the_useful_idea_of_truth/7jyn
Yudkowsky says:
A normative belief in rationality is, as far as I can tell, not possible for someone who does not have a clear concpetion of what rationality is. I am trying to present tools for forming such a conception. The theory I am presenting is, most accurately, a rationally constructed language, not a prescriptive theory on whether it is moral to be rational. The merit of this language is that it should allow you to converse about rationality with mysticists or religious people so that you both understand what you are talking about. It seems to me the ID vs. evolution debate remains unresolved among the general public (in the USA) because neither side has managed to speak the same language as the other side. My language is not formally defined in the sense of being a formal language, but it has formally defined ontological types.
I think the most you can hope for is a model of rationality and irrationality that can model mysticists or religious people as well as rationalists. I don’t think you can expect everyone to grok that model. That model may not be expressible in a mysticist’s model of reality.
Irrationality is just less instrumentally rational—less likely to win. You seem to have split rational and irrational into two categories, and I think this is just a methodological mistake. To understand and compare the two, you need to put both on the same scale, and then show how they have different measures on that scale.
Also, now that I look at more of your responses, it seems that you have your own highly developed theory, with your own highly developed language, and you’re speaking that language to us. We don’t speak your language. If you’re going to try to talk to people in a new language, you need to start simple, like “this is a ball”, so that we have some meaningful context from which to understand “I hit the ball.”
Quickly thereafter, you have to demonstrate, and not just assert, some value to your language to motivate any readers you have to continue learning your language.
Agree. The Pirahã could not use my model because abstract concepts are banned in their culture. I read from New Scientist that white man tried to teach them numbers so that they wouldn’t be cheated in trade so much, but upon getting some insight of what a number is, they refused to think that way. The analytic Metaphysics of Quality (my theory) would say that the Pirahã do not use transcendental language. They somehow know what it is and avoid it despite not having a name for it in their language. That language has only a few words.
The point is not to have everyone to grok at this model, but to use this model to explain reality. The differences between the concepts of “abstract” and “concrete” have been difficult to sort out by philosophers, but in this case the Pirahã behavior seems to be adequately explicable by using the concepts of “natural quality” and “transcendental quality” in the analytic Metaphysics of Quality.
Do you mean by “irrationality” something like a biased way of thinking whose existence can be objectively determined? I don’t mean that by irrationality. I mean things whose existence has no rational justification, such as stream of consciousness. Things like dreams. If you are in a dream, and open your (working) wrist watch, and find out it contains coins instead of clockwork, and behave as if that were normal, there is no rational justification for you doing so—at least none that you know of while seeing the dream.
You’re perfectly right. I’d like to go for the dialogue option, but obviously, if it’s too exhausting for you because my point of view is too remote, nobody will participate. That’s all I’m offering right now, though—dialogue. Maybe something else later, maybe not. I’ve had some fun already despite losing a lot of “karma”.
The problem with simple examples is that, for example, I’d have to start a discussion on what is “useful”. It seems to me the question is almost the same as “What is Quality?” The Metaphysics of Quality insists that Quality is undefinable. Although I’ve noticed some on LW have liked Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it seems this would already cause a debate in its own right. I’d prefer not to get stuck on that debate and risk missing the chance of saying what I actually wanted to say.
If that discussion, however, is necessary, then I’d like to point out irrational behavior, that is, a somewhat uncritical habit of doing the first thing that pops into my mind, has been very useful for me. It has improved my efficiency in doing things I could rationally justify despite not actually performing the justification except rarely. If I am behaving that way—without keeping any justifications in my mind—I would say I am operating in the subjective or mystical continuum. When I do produce the justification, I do it in the objective or normative continuum by having either one of those emerge from the earlier subjective or mystical continuum via strong emergence. But I am not being rational before I have done this in spite of ending up with results that later appear rationally good.
EDIT: Moved this post here upon finding out that I can reply to this comment. This 10 minute lag is pretty inconvenient.
If neither side accepts the other side’s language as meaningful, why do you believe they would accept the new language?
Somehow related: http://xkcd.com/927/
That’s a very good point. Gonna give you +1 on that. The language, or type system, I am offering has the merit of no such type system being devised before. I stick to this unless proven wrong.
Academic philosophy has it’s good sides. “Vagrant predicates” by Rescher are an impressive and pretty recent invention. I also like confirmation holism. But as far as I know, nobody has tried to do an ontology with the following features:
Is analytically defined
Explains both strong and weak emergence
Precision of conceptual differentiation can be expanded arbitrarily (in this case by splitting continua into a greater amount of levels)
Includes its own incompleteness as a non-well-formed set (Dynamic Quality)
Uses an assumption of symmetry to figure out the contents and structure of irrational ontological categories which are inherently unable to account for their structure, with no apparent problems
Once you grasp the scope of this theory I don’t think you’ll find a simpler theory to include all that meaningfully—but please do tell me if you do. I still think my theory is relatively simple when compared to quantum mechanics, except that it has a broad scope.
In any case, the point is that on a closer look it appears that my theory has no viable competition, hence, it is the first standard and not the 15th. No other ontology attempts to cover this broad a scope into a formal model.
Those are the labels used to describe the issue by the participants. But taking an outside view, the issue is inconsistent principles between the two sides. The fact that true religious believers reject the need for beliefs to pay rent in anticipated experience won’t be solved by new vocabulary.