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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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
Hard to answer accurately or comprehensibly in 280, but: I think those benefits are rarely (not never, but rarely) useful in practice, and they trade off against other desirable features that are more often useful.
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
Your position seems to me like saying that if we can't see the shortest path through a maze, then it must have no shortest path or at least the concept of a shortest path must not be useful. Seems useful to me. I don't get your weird ban? What else can be said?
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
I’m saying that in many/most cases there is no one correct metric, and therefore no shortest path. It’s an ontological objection, not an epistemological one. (Relatedly: I see rationalism as pervasively misunderstanding ontological questions as being epistemological ones.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @juliagalef and
So relativize the "shortest path" to a metric, like all preference orderings on options are relativized to a utility function. These ideas are technically straightforward, and if somebody manages to shoot themselves in the psychological foot, I would not blame the theory.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @FPallopides and
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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