Out of curiosity, do you think that the claims I've been laying out would be well-described as a "meta-rational" worldview, or if not, what's the distance between the not-quite-"rationalist" picture I've been painting and what you see as "meta-rational"?
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The element that I’d call clearly meta-rational is understanding that rationality is not one well-defined thing but a bag of tricks that are more-or-less applicable in different situations. It’s meta-rational in that it’s about how rationality works and is used in practice.
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Replying to @Meaningness @catherineols and
Meta-rationalism is based on an understanding that reality is unfixably “nebulous”—there is no correct description of it. I think I may hear that in what you said, also?
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Well, that's certainly central to my own personal worldview, but I can't quite connect it to CFAR rationality. Perhaps the platonic form of CFAR rationality holds that there definitely is "more correct" but maybe there isn't a "most correct". idk,
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tbh, I mostly try to stay away from debates over whether there is one objectively correct "Truth," or "Reality," bc I find them too confusing, & they don't end up seeming relevant to real decision-making anyway
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That’s my take also. In any case, we don’t now have The Correct Description, and there’s no likelihood of getting it soon, so we have to figure out how to act rationally without one.
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
… and this is “meta-rational” because, to apply any formally rational method, you need *some* description, which means you need to choose one; and that choice is about *how* best to apply rationality.
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Hm, so maybe "CFAR rationality" can really be thought of as a meta-rationality that holds "Yes, there is a normative criterion according to which one ought judge which is 'best' when considering how best to apply different formally and informally rational methods. It's 'max EV'."
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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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Replying to @Meaningness @catherineols and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @catherineols and
What’s different is that it treats decision theory as a tool that may or may not be useful depending on the situation, rather than as The Correct Way Of Being Rational Even If We Can’t Specify Exactly How To Use It.
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In general I think that when you can reduce some area of your life to a fairly tractable quantification that yields a reliable definite answer you should do so. My model of the world is that there is so much complexity hidden everywhere that this heuristic is of marginal use.
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