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Checklist of Rationality Habits

rationality.org

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Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#11

Post by wdewind »

JadeNB wrote: post #10

As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconsciou…

Read the list...

> I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#12

Post by tlholaday »

JadeNB wrote: post #10

As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconsciou…

> I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying.

I am confidant that any attempt to rule out the third possibility will fail.

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#13

Post by JadeNB »

wdewind wrote: post #11
JadeNB wrote: post #10

As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconsciou…

Read the list... > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)

> Read the list...

I did (although, as I noted, I think that part of being rational is critically creating your own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's). I also was not claiming that this was not on the list—but:

> I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode.

Although logically—well, in classical logic, anyway—every argument against something is an argument for its opposite, I think that there is nonetheless a meaningful difference between making a contrarian argument (as I do; it is an essentially negative process) and arguing for the opposite position (an essentially positive process).

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#14

Post by tlholaday »

xpda wrote: post #4
pokpokpok wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that the human brain is basically not set up for objectivity. Plenty of people who consider themselves rational are capable of making decisions that you would call unrational. Doesn't mean you need to live your life through a checklist, but it helps to be critical of thoughts like "I am a very rational person"

Sometimes I rationally realize that I am making an irrational decision, but I still prefer the "wrong" decision. For example, I may pick up a dirty penny in a street. The risk/reward is negative because the very slight possibility or disease or accident outweighs the very slight financial reward, but I prefer to pick up the penny anyway. Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong ch…

My detestation of observing penny-litter is of sufficient intensity that I would pay you a penny to pick up a penny. I dread that the fury-induced hand-tremor would cause me to drop the penny, leading to a catastrophic loop terminating with cupric entombment.

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#15

Post by JadeNB »

tlholaday wrote: post #12
JadeNB wrote: post #10

As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconsciou…

> I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying. I am confidant that any attempt to rule out the third possibility will fail.

> > I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying.

> I am confidant that any attempt to rule out the third possibility will fail.

To be sure, as the highly rational being that I am :-), I recognise that it is annoying; my question is whether it is just annoying, i.e., without any corresponding benefit.

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#17

Post by JadeNB »

zzzcpan wrote: post #5
xpda wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I rationally realize that I am making an irrational decision, but I still prefer the "wrong" decision. For example, I may pick up a dirty penny in a street. The risk/reward is negative because the very slight possibility or disease or accident outweighs the very slight financial reward, but I prefer to pick up the penny anyway. Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong ch…

I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it. If this is something you are interested in, check out Daniel Kahneman's book. EDIT: I would like to know the reason behind the downvote. Thanks.

> I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it.

I was the (or a) downvoter. While your point is certainly correct that humans are irrational animals and there is no way around it, that seemed essentially irrelevant to the specific question of whether performing a rational analysis, and then acting against it, should count as a rational or an irrational action. (To be fair, it is highly relevant to the discussion as a whole, just not, I think, to this thread.)

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#18

Post by ajross »

I'm distressed by how unscientific a lot of this stuff is. It's all good advice, but some of it seems to come from some pretty naive perceptions of how consciousness and the brain work. The example in 3.1, for example:

> Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong.

Fear of heights is a very primal, very understandable and even reasonably well understood response. Our brains have specific hardware for this kind of circumstance, and it exists for good (even "rational") reasons. Sweeping it into the same generic bucket with all other "irrationality" is just silly.

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#19

Post by scarmig »

JadeNB wrote: post #13
wdewind wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the list... > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)

> Read the list... I did (although, as I noted, I think that part of being rational is critically creating your own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's). I also was not claiming that this was not on the list—but: > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. Although logically—well, in classical logic, anyway—every ar…

Careful there, your constructivism is showing.

Re: Checklist of Rationality Habits

#20

Post by jjmason »

analog31 wrote: post #2

I tend to think of myself as rational, but the degree of introspection suggested by this checklist seems bizarre to me.

I feel as though most of the psychological issues and poor decision making I experienced when I was younger were because I thought of myself as a fundamentally rational person, and refused to examine the irrational things my brain was doing.

This made it more or less impossible for me to address harmful emotions (because emotions are irrational) or problematic behaviours (because I don't make irrational decisions), which led to some bad times, to say the least.

Our brains are basically not wired to be objective or rational. While the human brain has developed the ability to think rationally, there is a considerable amount of the kind of "gut level" machinery that kept us alive before we developed this ability lying around.

Without careful introspection and a willingness to admit that many of our thoughts and behaviours are, without careful examination, going to be deeply irrational no matter how much we believe in rationalism, we tend to act on our irrationality to our own detriment, and often to the detriment of others as well (remember when Colbert trolled Bush by saying they were both "guys who think with [their] guts"?)

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