The most relevant phrases to how we talk about rationality are probably "normative rationality," "bounded rationality" and "rational choice theory"
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Right: in order to apply any rational method, you first have to fix the ontological parameters (e.g. metric of goodness). My objection to rationalism is that it doesn’t want to look at the “meta-rational” process whereby you make those ontological choices.
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My objection is not to rationality: if the ontological choices are made effectively, then rational methods are often extraordinarily valuable. Yay science, engineering, medicine, etc!
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My suggestion is that rationality can be made more effective by teaching people that the ontological choices must be made deliberately, not by default, and teaching skills for ontology choice or construction.
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I'll do the paranoid thing here and say this sounds like trying to smuggle in pomo-ish ontological relativism through the back door (or meta door, in this case).
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Yes; the main point of the book is to explain meta-rationality, which is about how to make ontological choices *well*. It’s not relativist at all; quite the opposite.
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It’s specifically meant to help STEM people who have realized that there can be no ultimate foundation to knowledge, and are thereby thrown into pomo-ish nihilism. It gives a STEM-ish answer for how to proceed. This post explains that:https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge …
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Well, that was quite a slam-dunk falsification of my paranoia

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I’m glad! (Feeling paranoid is no fun)
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What distinguishes your position from the guy in math class claiming that there exists no absolute definition or way of counting apples, so 2 apples + 2 apples can't be said to yield 4 apples? Sure it's an ontological objection, but the answer is a sigh and to go on using math.
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That is a case in which one choice is almost certainly better than others (and it’s obvious which). I am not advocating unbounded relativism! In many cases, it *isn’t* obvious what ontology will work well; and meta-rationality is about how to deal with that.
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Example. I have some electronic circuit. Is a Kirkhoff’s Law approximation good enough? Or is it small enough that I have to go all the way to Maxwell’s equations? Or even, do I need a relativistic correction?
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Well, if you pick an approximation that gives you wrong answers, I suggest you update against your hypothesis that the circuit was large enough and the math such as to make that a good approximation.
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Yes: this is an instance of meta-rational reasoning! Note that it’s not based on general-purpose a priori considerations, but the domain-specific observation that circuit size is a major contributor to what ontology is appropriate.
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Are you under the impression CFAR doesn't teach this? They do. In practice, math teachers also teach the meta-math of deciding how many apples there are to add, aka "counting". They even teach "casting out nines", a higher criterion for deciding if a math calculation was right!
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If I may jump in and observe, I thiiiink the distinction here is whether "EV maximizing" is just a tool/framework like other tools, which can be appropriate at some times and not at others, or whether it's closer to objective like "shortest path" in the maze example.
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Yes! This has been a very interesting discussion—thank you all! I’m going to sleep now… I may have more to day tomorrow :)
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Proposed crux: rationalists believe our experience, or our universe if you prefer, is fundamentally mathematical Others believe that math is a neat trick that approximates a lot of what we experience and is useful once a bunch of ontological magic is performed first.
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