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:
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.
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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.