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Idk, if we had invented a new name for a concept that already exists in decision science I feel like ppl would be griping about that too.
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Yes, some people (like me) will always find something to complain about :) Is your conception of “rationality” in fact restricted to that of decision science? My impression is that the community has a broader sense of it (but individuals vary, and yours may be more specific).
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I never asked Eliezer directly but assume he must have gotten those definitions from the decision science literature (which includes parts of economics, philosophy, psychology and comp sci relevant to modeling normative decision making) bc that's how that literature uses the word
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The most relevant phrases to how we talk about rationality are probably "normative rationality," "bounded rationality" and "rational choice theory"
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Thank you! I will chew on this overnight… My immediate reaction is “yes, this is familiar mainstream stuff, but I don’t think this is quite what the LW-sphere advocates, even taking into account community diversity”—but I need to think that through carefully before saying so!
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Yeah 99% of the work is figuring out how a human, with a messy human brain, can approximate the normative model. What heuristics work well, in what contexts? When is following explicit rules useful vs. just training your intuition through experience? etc. Lots of diff. ideas here
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Baron’s distinction between “normative” and “prescriptive” is one I haven’t seen before. That seems useful and maybe key. OTOH, if we’re looking for a disagreement crux, it might be whether a normative theory that can’t be achieved, even in principle, is a good thing.
But the normative theories have technical uses! Tons of them! All of the coherence theorems! Papers calculating an algorithm's distance from an unreachable optimum! Why wouldn't you just have prescriptions based on the goal of getting closer to unreachable normativity?
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Ah! This is very interesting… here you seem to have a “harder” take on rationality than some other people from the LW-derived community I’ve been discussing this with. 1/2
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