Comment by Xirdus
5 days ago
On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
5 days ago
On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
I think rationalism might be one of those things where those self identifying and those practicing might only be slightly intersecting.
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
That feels like a "no true scotsman"...
It shouldn't.
You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
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In the context of this discussion, rationalist should be taken to refer to people who are or have been active on LessWrong
This unfortunately doesn’t help if it isn’t paired with withholding judgement in the face of insufficient evidence, but rationalists don’t do that. They just pick a model they like and continue, and the burden of scrutinizing that model is on others.
Making rational decisions means picking the most responsible option given imperfect information. It doesn't mean delaying decisions until you have perfect information because that point never comes.
Sufficient information, not perfect information.
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If your pick of the option is based on emotion or aesthetics, the decision isn’t rational. Presenting is as such is misleading and dishonest.
Rationalists seem to believe that their ability to convince themselves of anything given enough evidence is a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's a sign of being disconnected from yourself and your true values. There is a great amount of wisdom and intelligence in properly honed intuition.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
I have never seen a room get colder than when I told a bunch of rationalists that intuition has value.