Important: by “rationalists,” I do NOT primarily mean the LW-derived community. I’m pointing to a whole history going back to the Ancient Greeks, and whose most prototypical example is early-20th-century logical positivism.
Well, to the extent that it holds that there *is* a single normative criterion, I would categorize it as rationalist (and mistaken imo).
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On this particular point, I think we're still not on the same page RE your intent with the definition in your paragraph. CFAR rationality has a single normative *meta*-rationalist criterion which adjudicates which methods (formal & informal) are good to use when.
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Hmm. Often when I explain meta-rationalism, rationalists say “well, there must exist a guaranteed-optimal way of selecting which rational method to use.” That’s rationalism, under my definition, and not meta-rationalism. 1/2
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On the other hand, if one admits that EV is inherently nebulous (not well defined) then it starts to move away from hard rationalism. But then it’s not so clear what work EV is doing. It becomes a “floating signifier” and it’s not clear whether the theory has any bite.
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If you say “in some kinds of situations, we can identify things that are modeled reasonably well as probabilities, and others that are modeled reasonably well as utilities, then a decision-theoretic framework may work reasonably well”— that is a prototypically meta-rational move
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I guess another relevant point re: "CFAR rationality" is that it also uses the framework of adjudicating internal disputes. Like, noticing that part of you thinks/wants X and part of you thinks/wants Y, and approaching that like an intellectual disagreement
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Another point of enthusiastic agreement! Some touchstones for me on this: Robert Kegan; Kramer & Alstad; George Ainsle; Robert Bly; Michel Foucault. Very different, complementary approaches to working with internal disagreements.
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