If I understand you correctly, I wholeheartedly agree that “Less Wrong” is not just referring to a dichotomy of “what is true” and “what is wrong” (although that is part of it, ala ‘Map and Territory’).
There’s a reason rationality is often called “systemized winning”; while the goals that you are trying to win are entirely subjective, rationality can help you decide what is most optimal in your pursuit of goal Y.
Well, my main point was, that error can be of arbitrary type, one may be of the modeling of what is (“Map”), another of modeling what we want to be (“Territory”), and one can think of infinite number of various types of “errors”, - logical, ethical, pragmatic, moral, ecological, cultural, situational, .. the list goes on and on. And, if each type of error we think of “suboptimality”, then “less err” or “less wrong” would be etymologically equivalent to “optimize”. So, we’re a community for optimization. And that’s actually equivalent to intelligence.
No matter, if we are seeking for truth or pragmatics, the methods of rationality remain largely the same—it’s the general mathematical methods of optimizing.
If I understand you correctly, I wholeheartedly agree that “Less Wrong” is not just referring to a dichotomy of “what is true” and “what is wrong” (although that is part of it, ala ‘Map and Territory’).
There’s a reason rationality is often called “systemized winning”; while the goals that you are trying to win are entirely subjective, rationality can help you decide what is most optimal in your pursuit of goal Y.
Well, my main point was, that error can be of arbitrary type, one may be of the modeling of what is (“Map”), another of modeling what we want to be (“Territory”), and one can think of infinite number of various types of “errors”, - logical, ethical, pragmatic, moral, ecological, cultural, situational, .. the list goes on and on. And, if each type of error we think of “suboptimality”, then “less err” or “less wrong” would be etymologically equivalent to “optimize”. So, we’re a community for optimization. And that’s actually equivalent to intelligence.
No matter, if we are seeking for truth or pragmatics, the methods of rationality remain largely the same—it’s the general mathematical methods of optimizing.