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A first lesson in meta-rationality

metarationality.com

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Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#51

Post by mannykannot »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #43
chubot wrote: post #23

From the Church-Turing Thesis, we know there’s nothing special going on! We know humans can’t do anything more than a computer can. I see people making such claims about human cognition all the time, and I have no idea how it follows. (note the author is paraphrasing "people" here) The Church-Turing Thesis says nothing about human cognition. It is perfectly plausible that a human can do things a computer can't. (Scot…

> The burden of proof is on people who claim that human cognition can be simulated by computer, not the other way around. To me, it seems far more likely that it can't. C-T makes a claim about computable functions on natural numbers. It seems strange to argue that humans can perform such computations on a fundamental level better than a computer, thus we might assume the same is true of more complex computations. So…

I don't think anyone is claiming that humans can compute computable functions in some way better than a computer, the claim is that minds can do things that are not reducible to computing computable functions. See, for example, the Lucas-Penrose argument:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument

Note that I am not suggesting that I concur with it.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#52

Post by mannykannot »

chubot wrote: post #39
throwamon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's my refutation of the (silly IMO) "simulation argument" I'm not one of these people, but your rebuttal wouldn't convince me if I were. Maybe we are the SimCity of a much more complex universe.

OK, but I'm saying the burden of proof is on who think that simulation is possible. It's not at all obvious that it is. As far as I can tell, the idea was basically made popular by movies [1], and there is no science behind it. All the science I know of points the other way -- simulating anything is incredibly hard and slow. It requires approximations and shortcuts to make it work for specific cases, and it doesn't w…

If we go around demanding proof of every hypothesis before considering its implications, we will find that we have very little to think about. Not even mathematics and philosophy are conducted at this level of rigor.

The burden of proof is a double-edged sword: it can be used to rein in tendentiousness, but also to avoid discussing an issue.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#53

Post by ghodith »

rrmm wrote: post #45
jxf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you characterize the opposite of (or alternative to) "systematic" thinking?

Not an alternative to systematization, but different systems. Just that the analogies or groups that make sense to one group may not make sense to others.

Could you give an example of a different type?

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#54

Post by Buldak »

rrmm wrote: post #26
mckirk wrote: post #12

Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity the author had in mind. I love…

Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.

Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#55

Post by wydfre »

If anyone is interested in this, they should look into Alfred Korzybski and general semantics. He invented the term "The map is not the territory", in case you want an idea of who he is.

IIRC, he at one point says in his book, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics" something along the lines that the mistakes most people make are in categorization. Something along the lines of "Some things look the same but they are different, and some things look different but they are the same". It's a very interesting book and I loved how Non-Aristotelian logic was used in Null-A by A.E. van Vogt, which introduced it to me.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#56

Post by Viliam1234 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #50

I don’t see how Bongard problems are human complete if the author can’t even solve half of them. Does that mean he doesn’t have human intelligence? I think a better candidate for human complete is “knowing what other humans are thinking”. AKA “theory of mind”.

That would exclude many neurodivergent people. Perhaps also other cultures, and social classes.

It is easier to guess the state of minds of people who are similar to you. Because then your natural algorithm "what would I feel in such situation? what would make me say these words, act this way?" is more likely to match how they feel and think.

I suspect that many people overestimate their ability to "read other people's minds". First, they rarely verify their guesses. (I see another person and conclude that they are angry. I usually don't approach them and ask "hey, are you angry?". Therefore, if my guess was wrong, I am not going to learn it.) Second, if they turn out to be wrong, it's always the other person's fault. (If an autist cannot guess a neurotypical person's thoughts, it's the autist's fault. If a neurotypical person cannot guess an autist's thoughts, guess what, that's also the autist's fault.) Third, it is easier to guess thoughts of people we frequently talk to, because people usually think today the same thing they thought yesterday, and they already told us what they thought yesterday.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#57

Post by rrmm »

ghodith wrote: post #53
rrmm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an alternative to systematization, but different systems. Just that the analogies or groups that make sense to one group may not make sense to others.

Could you give an example of a different type?

Broadly, for example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2838233/

"""

Analytic cognition is characterized by taxonomic and rule-based categorization of objects, a narrow focus in visual attention, dispositional bias in causal attribution, and the use of formal logic in reasoning. In contrast, holistic cognition is characterized by thematic and family-resemblance-based categorization of objects, a focus on contextual information and relationships in visual attention, an emphasis on situational causes in attribution, and dialecticism (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).

"""

This also comes up a lot in cognitive test design.

The anecdote I've always heard in reference to it was

""" What is considered wise in one society may not be considered wise in another; the value and meaning of intelligence depends on cultural norms. Demonstrating the culturally-specific nature of knowledge and intelligence, Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971) conducted an experiment in which Western participants and Kpelle participants from Liberia were given an object-sorting task. Participants were asked to sort twenty objects that were divided evenly into the linguistic cat-egories of foods, implements, food containers, and clothing. Westerners tended to sort these objects into the groups for food and implements, while Liberian partici-pants would routinely pair a potato with a knife because, they reasoned, the knife is used to cut the potato. When questioned, Liberian participants justified their pairings by stating that a wise person would group the items in this way. When the researchers asked them to show what an unwise person would do, they did the taxonomic sort that is more familiar to the Western culture. """

quoted from https://uscaseps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/standardized...

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#58

Post by diab0lic »

hliyan wrote: post #34

I've always considered "pattern recognition for the purpose of prediction" a core function of the human brain that precedes language, rationality or any form of logic. So it feels counter-intuitive to me to label this meta-rationality or even associate it with rationality. I subscribe somewhat to the idea that much of our rational decision making is ex post facto , i.e a verbal narration that comes after the decision…

This ex post facto explanation is referred to as rationalization and is ironically irrational. If you’ve already made a decision you’ve forfeited the option to do so rationally.

I do agree that most of what gets labeled rational is in fact ex post facto rationalization. I do it myself all the time, haha.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#59

Post by rrmm »

Buldak wrote: post #54
rrmm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.

Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."

These sorts of tasks are teaching you how to think a specific way which our society promotes. Mechanistic, natural, causal, rational (in the first-order logic sense) with a healthy dose of Ockham's razor and simplicity as an aesthetic.

I stress though, I'm a big fan of these things and the innovations they have enabled, but you still have to understand that they are an axiomatic underpinning. It's like Euclid's parallel postulate in a way: There is non-euclidean geometry out there.

Re: A first lesson in meta-rationality

#60

Post by rrmm »

diab0lic wrote: post #58
hliyan wrote: post #34

I've always considered "pattern recognition for the purpose of prediction" a core function of the human brain that precedes language, rationality or any form of logic. So it feels counter-intuitive to me to label this meta-rationality or even associate it with rationality. I subscribe somewhat to the idea that much of our rational decision making is ex post facto , i.e a verbal narration that comes after the decision…

This ex post facto explanation is referred to as rationalization and is ironically irrational. If you’ve already made a decision you’ve forfeited the option to do so rationally. I do agree that most of what gets labeled rational is in fact ex post facto rationalization. I do it myself all the time, haha.

Ex post facto rationalization is a major annoyance of mine. Let's just be honest with ourselves and recognize that lots of what we want isn't rational. That's ok, use your rationality to keep yourself from making huge, dumb mistakes, but don't pretend you're doing it for "rational" reasons or through a "rational" process.

But I'm kind of over-strict about it and like to reserve "rational" for processes you can do with first-order logic. Given the complexity and lack of information in real life, that happens almost never. Of course this is not a terribly rational point of view.

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