I have this suspicion that there is no way to be context sensitive in a rational way. To make a rational context-dependent argument, you must necessarily (and paradoxically) include some irrational elements (in the form of humor, narrative, identity performance, cherrypicking...)
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The thing is, reasoning goes from boring to impossibly hard very sharply in bounded-context domains (chess, math, law, textual scholarship), for your IQ level. It’s a step-function almost. In such domains it’s hard to lie to yourself about being rational...
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Because you can tell when you hit your limit in your favorite home bounded domain, you develop a false confidence that you know when you’re being irrational. You carry this false confidence with you everywhere. Including into unbounded contexts.
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Thing about unbounded contexts is that it’s like the frame or-blend in AI. As you wander out of familiar bounded contexts, you don’t run into your own context ignorance suddenly. No bright flashing sign telling you, “your reason is unreliable beyond this point.”
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You get context creep instead. One subtle thing after the other undermining your reasoning, boiling your thinking like a frog, until you sound hilariously stupid to those with better context awareness, while convinced you’re being rational.
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Sure your arguments are rational. That’s a very logical way of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?. Oh wait, you didn’t know you were on a ship? Out at sea? Reason is still useful. You’re just applying it at the wrong locus.
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Ironically, the way to fight irrationality is with irrationality. Like a control burn to fight a forest fire. In unbounded contexts, things like jokes, stories, metaphors, identity performance aren’t ephemera that obscure the “real” argument. Theyre necessary. Why?
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They’re what get you to the right locus for reason to useful operate, in helping you make your case. Reason is a last-mile, local optimization cognitive process in unbounded context domains.
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Why? Because there’s no reasonable way to scope context down from the enormous space of possible places the argument could go. So you create a foundation with unreason. It’s not simply “state your assumptions/axioms”... that’s an ex-post clean up.
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Ex-ante, you have to get to the start line of reason somehow, following a trail of clues via weird leaps of anarchic thought Show me a rational argument with clean axioms and I’ll show you a cleaned-up crime scene. You can verify axioms —> conclusions, but not context —> axioms
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Replying to @vgr
Isn’t this the standard refinement loop of development? Hypothesis to test to new hypothesis to new test? Eventually, this loop,iterates to new self consistent axioms and conclusions while generating data.
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And if you stretch, this is all just iterated OODA loops.
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