

Twelve virtues of rationality - Hexstream
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues

======
dgordon
"The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a
falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your
hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse.
If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans
share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world
achieves perfection."

This seems almost to gesture toward a thought I've been tossing around my head
lately. If you're basically a conventional person, with a conventional,
average view of the world, conventional understanding of morality, and so
forth, people who never knew you will look back at you from the future and
ask, "How could you think such things? What was wrong with you?" We say it
about people in the times when slavery was conventional, when segregation was
conventional, when entrenched sexism was conventional, when Nazism was
conventional. People will say it about conventions of our time as well, and, I
must say, rightfully so.

The only way around this is to give serious and continual examination to the
conventions of our time -- to quote John Taylor Gatto, "the great non-thought
of received ideas." People of the future, with higher shoulders on which to
stand, will probably still find places to criticize you. No one is perfect,
and no one can escape entirely the influence of their time and place. But what
shows one's commitment to the good is moving toward it -- which, in turn,
helps others move toward it.

And the same applies to physics. Every physics major today knows about
relativity. That does not make them better physicists than, say, Newton. That
credit can only go to those who move conventions -- be they in moral
philosophy, or physics, or medicine, or anything else -- not those who follow
them, however advanced the conventions they inherit happen to be.

------
swombat
Are there virtues to irrationality too? It would be better to balance this
article with one that presents the 12 virtues of irrationality...

To get started on this list:

1) Goodness - sometimes the rational choice is not the right choice.

2) Rapidity of execution - it can take hours or even a lifetime to come to a
rational decision on some complicated, vaguely defined subjects (such as
ethics). The irrational decision engine in your brain can make that decision
in a split-second and be right most of the time.

3) Better resilience to incorrect or incomplete data - sometimes, you have
incorrect or incomplete data, and no way to correct or complete it. Based on
your rational analysis, you may decide to, for instance, refuse to meet
someone. And yet, once you actually meet them, you may gather new information
that changes your previous rational choice.

There's no doubt many more...

~~~
inimino
None of those represent virtues of irrationality, but rather common
misunderstandings of rationality.

1) If goodness is your goal, rationality lights the path.

2) To engage in a lifetime of cogitation when a split-second decision would be
good enough (given your goals) is not rational.

3) Rationality includes making decisions under incomplete information
(including the correct assessment of risks). The argument you present here in
fact presupposes rationality.

------
markbao
Some guy went to the Hacker News Coffee Palo Alto
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285623>) a few months back and handed
out copies of this.

Does anyone know who this was? He looked strikingly similar to Yudkowsky...

~~~
Eliezer
I think that _was_ Yudkowsky.

~~~
markbao
WTF man? Why didn't you say so? :)

------
known
These virtues precede of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>

------
LPTS
He listed 7 reasons his worldview was better than yours before covering
humility. List ordering fail.

I deny that humility is a virtue and that humility corresponds to rationality.

Also, it's rational to be occasionally irrational, because that instability
contributes to beneficial evolutionary changes in the structure of thought.

~~~
inimino
"It's rational to be occasionally irrational" is an irrational statement. It
is rational to be open to new ideas, but that is not irrationality.

~~~
LPTS
No I mean it's rational to go bat-shit "the lizard men would have gotten me if
it weren't for the fairy tucking me into extra dimensions where my entire
worldview fell apart like a glass chandelier shattering I feel like I'm
dreaming but I'm wide awake get that guy some seizure meds" irrational every
now and then.

It's most rational to be able to slide into any degree of irrationality that
maximizes the placebo effect and evolutionary change in thought. Thinking is
what you put into your brain to cocreate your reality. Irrational thinking can
sometimes lead to the creation of a better reality. (It's probably irrational
to feel optimistic about your business endeavor, but you're more likely to
succeed if you think it anyway.) I mean a lot more then being open to new
ideas. I mean having the mental flexibility to slide from completely insane to
completely rational intentionally, and using that to create the best reality.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Not so sure I agree about the lizard men, but I agree in principle.

It's a bit like tai chi. You can say that chi is bs, and it's all about how
you move your body. And you'd be right.

But, for most people at lest, without _believing_ on some level that you're
tossing energy around, you _won't_ move your body right.

The key is to be able to believe that in the way that is useful, and yet,
still have the clarity to look at your beliefs and recognize that some of them
are not, in fact, accurate models of the universe. Outside of an epistemology
essay, we _can_ in fact believe and not believe the same thing at the same
time, and quite often do. The trick is to do it intentionally.

~~~
LPTS
The interaction between Tai Chi and thinking about energy and moving right
tells us a lot about cognitive processing. It's an interesting thing. If Tai
Chi relates to cognitive processing, they are just describing as energy a real
phenomena we describe in cognitive processing terms. Kind of like when we make
a model of something described as a wave, and another model of that thing
described as a particle. And both contradict each other but are confirmable
experimentally. Tai Chi is an excellent example of this kind of thing.

I would press on you one step farther here, though. You say "still have the
clarity to look at your beliefs and recognize that some of them are not, in
fact, accurate models of the universe." I would press one step farther and say
it's not even possible to have an accurate model of the universe, and that
anything you could possibly believe would not be an accurate model about the
universe. All you can say is what happens when your nervous system bumps into
reality.

The lesson from quantum physics is that there is no way to discharge your
instruments (whether science tools or your brain) from what you are saying
about your universe. Therefore, nothing you say is an accurate model of any
part of the universe.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Just because some parts are wrong, that doesn't mean that no parts are right.

Models are expectation limiters, and experience predictors. Not all models are
created equal; they vary in specificity and in accuracy.

The phrase "there are two cats on my bed", I'm pretty sure, is about as right
as possible. This is my bed. I'm looking at two cats sleeping soundly on it.
When I close my eyes, I can still feel them three. EVERY prediction that is
limited by that model turns out to have been properly limited. EVERY
prediction that model suggests is accurate. It is, in fact, as true as true
gets.

On the other hand, the sentence "light is a wave" is saying a much more
specific thing about the universe. Like the two cats on my bed statement, it
rules out some expectations, and suggests some predictions. As it turns out,
some of those expectations are correctly limited, and some are not; some of
the predictions are validated, and some are not.

Therefor, we can say that, while it may be useful to consider light being a
wave in some instances, it clearly is actually something other than a wave
that just happens to be wave-like. If it was _actually_ a wave, then _every_
prediction would be validated, not just some of them.

We can go a step further, even, and in some cases talk about the degree of
truth of a given model. The truth value only has to be predictably higher than
0% in order to be useful; but it has to be 100% to be considered _actually_
true. Furthermore, specificity effects the value of truth. A statement about
cats on my bed may be 100% true, but it's not nearly as risky or specific as a
statement about the fundamental nature of light. The main usefulness of this
100% true statement is for me to know that my feet will be kept warm.

And, while I personally care deeply about the comfort of my feet, in the grand
scheme of things, it's just not that big a deal.

