Lucy Keer

Or maybe I should say that some people seem to learn rationality and meta-rationality in an intertwined way, so that meta-rationality never looks counterintuitive because it's been part of the lesson all along.

An excess focus on rationality, neglecting the meta-rational aspects, looks to me more like something produced by tribal signaling ("our thinking is better than that of emotion-only hippies"), psychological insecurities or autism spectrum traits rather than a logical necessity.

This ties back to what @everytstudies said in the quoted thread - "it would be way easier to absorb [the constructivist lesson] from people who didn't come off as hostile". Meta-rationality wouldn't be so counterintuitive if its ideas weren't associated with a hostile tribe.

Thanks for the replies! Yeah, I've read the first bit of @everytstudies podcast transcript and liked the social constructivist example too (also reminds me I should read some of those people). I agree that the transition could be made easier...

e.g. by showing what's on the other side of pomo ideas. I think the transition would still be fairly difficult even without the hostility though, so maybe we disagree on that.

Maybe? My main grasp of rationalism is LW rationalism, which I realize is slightly different than David's main critique - but still, when I started reading the Sequences, a lot of it felt like a scientific explanation of that pomo stuff my humanities friend talked about.

Hm, yes OK that is surprising to me, I didn't get anything like that out of the LW sequences (I've only read parts, and relatively recently). Which bits are you thinking of, out of interest?

It's been a long time since I read them, but lots of stuff that seemed to be saying things like "judgments are in the mind of the interpreter rather rather than being objective facts of the world", e.g. https://www.readthesequences.com/Mind-Projection-Fallacy … .