Intelligent readers often complain that they don’t get what I mean by “meta-rational,” and want examples.
Here are some nice ones from @JohnDCook's blog:
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are microservices embodied metarationality? not sure how i feel about that.
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Hmm, I wouldn’t have made that connection… not sure what you are pointing to?
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in my CS courses I learned a lot about algorithms and not a whole lot about how to make large, complex, multi-layered software/hardware systems work let alone how to structure and maintain them and collaborate with others to do this work.
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It’s hard to teach that stuff, partly because it is partly meta-rational, and we don’t yet have good methods for talking about (or teaching) meta-rationality
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especially as "all problems are people problems" and those are invulnerable to stack traces
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Nicely put!
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Interesting that all your examples are from an educational context. Leads me to ask two questions: 1. How do you teach meta-rational thinking/seeing/acting? 2. Whose job is it to do that?
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1. I’m trying to figure that out 2. Mine maybe?https://meaningness.com/metablog/meta-rationality-curriculum …
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Very true! There are also software engineering curricula that do teach managing vast, amorphous messes! Get a degree in software engineering instead of computer science!
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“Bring out your differential equations!” is a failure of naive rationalism.
“A feedback loop of provisional problem formulation, attempted solution, revised formulation” is meta-rational.
Intro stats books create the rationalist misunderstanding that science gets results by pushing data through a formula.
Meta-rationality requires asking what your data *mean*; and only then asking which statistical methods are relevant and why.
The CS curriculum teaches methods for solving small, well-formulated hard problems: the essence of rationality.
Mostly irrelevant to software engineering practice, which is about managing vast, amorphous messes: a major theme in meta-rationality.