I think we, once again, need a new term to describe “the position that thinking clearly is worthwhile” because “rationalist” doesn’t really have that connotation (now, and maybe not ever.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
Isn’t it important to include the non-thinking aspects of skillfully applying mind, such as caring, feeling, intending, intuiting, and attending? The rationalists I know are already pretty good at cognizing; it’s the subtler, squishier aspects of being that often elude them.
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Replying to @delysis @Meaningness
Hardly anyone is good enough at ordinary thinking to solve practical problems as hard as “working one’s way out of poverty.” Other stuff matters too but rationalists are very much not already good enough at thinking.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
Interesting, the rationalists I know are not impoverished (wrt $). It’s easy to go broke thinking all too clearly w/o other skills needed to make and market (e.g., gestalt-awareness, feeling-awareness, attention-steering). Cognitive bypassing is the anti-pattern I’m seeing.
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Replying to @delysis @Meaningness
It’s typical to not be improverished if your parents weren’t; that’s kind of baseline. Moving up socioeconomically is hard & doesn’t happen by default.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
Delysis Retweeted Delysis
Sure, but is upward mobility a great heuristic for a life well-lived? Even if so, up doesn’t happen by thought alone. The other critical skills are often not within the field of awareness for those who fancy themselves symbol-manipulation machines.https://twitter.com/delysis/status/1181518320635449345?s=21 …
Delysis added,
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Replying to @delysis @Meaningness
Ah, I think I have a strong difference of emphasis with you, (since I don’t think learning non-thought skills is urgent), and possibly a belief difference (since I think I do believe brains are computers)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
Agreed re our frame differences. Yours is in line with the rationalists I know. idgi, though: If skillful coping was reducible to clear cognizing, wouldn’t high performers be able to introspect on and transmit their skills with words? irl that’s not how skill transfer works.
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Replying to @delysis @Meaningness
I don’t believe skilled coping is verbalizable; do believe it’s computable because how could it not be!
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
>> how could it not be How could it be? Animals (even c elegans) use subjective experience (e.g., qualia, pleasure, pain), which we haven’t the foggiest idea how to host on a computational substrate, even theoretically.
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I don’t know what it could mean for a physical object to *not* be a computation. We just don’t know the language of the encoding of qualia (but people are working on it!)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
“The language of encoding qualia,” begs the question, and the presumption —that qualia is lexical code— is at odds with findings in neuroscience and phenomenology. Lacking a better mechanistic model than computation in no way renders computing a fitting metaphor for being.
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Libet 1985, Daniel Dennett, and Church-Turing were frequently invoked (sometimes wittingly).