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:
well, that's what was an interesting exception in this case. they actually threw out the standardized test because it was so useless. the short response written test they gave was idiosyncratic to the department.
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Ah, I see—I misread your previous tweet!
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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we were asked a battery of questions regarding law and ethics that we were expected to give the standard accepted/acceptable response for/ we were then asked some questions where we were supposed to demonstrate awareness of multiple varieties of risk and cost hazards.
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the professor who taught the course was wise to what was going on with this stuff and knew better than to think he could usefully instruct total novices on a subject like that, especially given the outmoded curriculum. so he just "sanity checked" the class and let us go.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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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.