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I don't think just rationality cuts it, you need a goal. For example, I see many MBAs being rational in their relentless focus on efficiency. Yet, this is react

by js8 6y ago

I don't think just rationality cuts it, you need a goal. For example, I see many MBAs being rational in their relentless focus on efficiency. Yet, this is reactive (to the market), it doesn't follow any value in itself. To attempt to do something that nobody did before, or even to pursue a certain value above other, is inherently irrational. Yanis Varoufakis told a nice story about him teaching game theory. At the beginning of the semester, he offered the class a free pass of the course: Each student would write down the grade they would want and they would all be awarded by the minimal grade that was proposed. But first, they would have to agree on this proposal. He mentions that there always was a person who refused to agree. When he asked them, why did they were against it, they responded, without a hint of irony, there would surely be some idiot that would write down a low grade (and they would not pass). Frankly, I don't think this problem has a rational solution. It's a paradox - by being totally rational, you're being irrational. And I think the same is true for rationalism as a life philosophy. If you apply it to everything, the life will be hollow.

sudosysgen 6y ago
This is a very good point. Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system, and all value systems are inherently irrational. It manifests in philopshy as the "is-ought" problem.
- dbtc 6y ago
  Actually I think the value system of rationality is based on the (arguably irrational) belief in the supremacy of rationality. This is an ahumanist or post-humanist value system. Rationalism becomes a movement of transcendence from mortality, fleshly desires, the unconscious, and nature. The rationalist worships the neural network.
- chrchang523 6y ago
  Rationality is about internal consistency of beliefs and values. "Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system" strikes me as a category error. Giving you a value system isn't its job; instead, it provides a toolbox for identifying and resolving contradictions in your preexisting beliefs and values. (Since we all work with imperfect information about the world, internal consistency is far from a guarantee of accuracy; but it improves the odds.)
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    There are two issues here. First of all, not all value systems are rational and optimizable. The most relevant ones to humans simply aren't. Building a rational system to maximize these value systems is an impossible task, it's a category error. Like trying to run regression with a non-differentiable cost function. Value systems are an "ought". No rational, logical system can ever change them. Resolving contradictions in your values is a categorical error, because there is no such thing as having more than one value means inherent contradiction. As a result, a purely rationalist perspective is ineffective. You can only achieve a certain level of rationality. Which is already exactly what people have been doing for millenia, trying to find the most logical way to follow their values, and trying to phrase their inherent, base values into a set of explicit values that represent them as well as possible. It's not anything different from what secular philosophy has done for over 4000 years now if you construe it that way. Finally, it's never possible to know that your system is without any contradiction, because that would be equivalent to solving the halting problem. So, do you have a notion that contradiction can be estimated? Measured? How do you come to the conclusion that your belief system, with that contradiction removed, is any less contradictory than before, knowing full well that you might have introduced a more complex, as of yet unknown contradiction, or ten thousand of them? And so it seems that having soft contradictions is not actually necessarily a bad thing, and that jumping to resolve them should only be done if they actually are terminal, because balancing contradictions in your cognitive process is actually very doable and a good tool. It's not just about information either, even with perfect knowledge it's impossible to be sure of the absence of contradiction. In other words, it's never possible to prove a the consistency of a model in that model itself. You can try to prove it using the framework of another model, but how do you know that that model is consistent? You can't. This is why I personally try to ground the internal consistency of my though process in the material world - a contradiction is only problematic if resolving it can materially improve the situation or understanding I derive from it. But then again, Philosophical materialism vs idealism is a whole other can of worms, so il leave it to that very small facet of it.
    - chrchang523 6y ago
      It is not necessary to resolve all contradictions in one's beliefs and values to gain some benefit from rational introspection. Even professional physicists haven't arrived at a consensus on how general relativity and quantum mechanics fit together; that doesn't make the internal consistency of those two models worthless.
- Def_Os 6y ago
  What's your take on Harris' The Moral Landscape?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    I find it pretty much useless. It's just a confused case for rule utilitarianism, an age old moral framework, that makes some good arguments for it but fixes none of its problems. Overall, the central claim is unproven. To make the central claim worthwhile, Harris would have to find a way to measure well-being. Since he can't, there is really no difference between that and bog standard utilitarianist ethics.
chrchang523 6y ago
I don't see how the disagreeing students in Varoufakis's classes are irrational. There are at least four reasonable explanations I can think of for their behavior. 1. They perceive a tail risk that at least one student is willing to spite the others. Possibly a student that has less to lose from bad grades than their classmates do, but that's not the only context where it could happen. While an assumption that everyone has the same values and will make the optimal choice under those values often leads to an effective approximation, modeling human behavior isn't always that simple... especially when only one person has to deviate for your model to make a catastrophically wrong prediction. 2. Grades aren't quite on an absolute scale; at least when pushed to extremes like "everyone in the class gets an A+", the most sophisticated readers of the transcripts will interpret that A+ differently than an A+ in the same class where the distribution of grades was more typical. 3. Getting yourself to behave in your long-term self-interest isn't always trivial. People do things like publicly commit to donating to a cause they hate if they don't achieve goal X, to try to increase their chance of reaching that goal when they've wanted to but failed in the past. Meaningful grades can be better than their absence if you struggle with self-control and trust the professor enough. 4. If you have a clear interest in seeing your classmates put effort into the course, you might vote against this. Note that, in some of these cases, the student has an incentive to be quiet about their primary motive and instead give the cover-story explanation Varoufakis heard. I don't think those cases are likely (I think it really is mostly #1), but I wouldn't rule them out.
- js8 6y ago
  The disagreeing students are rational and irrational at the same time; their rationality forces them to act irrationally. That's why it is a paradox, kind of similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_paradox Of course you can argue about the details in particular situation, just like you can explain that the card is not really a paradox, as the statements were written by different people, etc. The main reason why I pointed out the story is that it is a certain answer to the question, why are not rational people (more) successful? We can easily imagine a class of "irrational" students, who take the Varoufakis' proposal, all get their good grades, and move on to other tasks, beating the hardcore rationalists in the process.
biolurker1 6y ago
Varoufakis is not only very irrational but mentally ill and I take full responsibility for saying this.

by js8 6y ago

sudosysgen 6y ago

This is a very good point. Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system, and all value systems are inherently irrational. It manifests in philopshy as the "is-ought" problem.

dbtc 6y ago
Actually I think the value system of rationality is based on the (arguably irrational) belief in the supremacy of rationality. This is an ahumanist or post-humanist value system. Rationalism becomes a movement of transcendence from mortality, fleshly desires, the unconscious, and nature. The rationalist worships the neural network.
chrchang523 6y ago
Rationality is about internal consistency of beliefs and values. "Rationalism is inherently flawed in that it lacks a value system" strikes me as a category error. Giving you a value system isn't its job; instead, it provides a toolbox for identifying and resolving contradictions in your preexisting beliefs and values. (Since we all work with imperfect information about the world, internal consistency is far from a guarantee of accuracy; but it improves the odds.)
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There are two issues here. First of all, not all value systems are rational and optimizable. The most relevant ones to humans simply aren't. Building a rational system to maximize these value systems is an impossible task, it's a category error. Like trying to run regression with a non-differentiable cost function. Value systems are an "ought". No rational, logical system can ever change them. Resolving contradictions in your values is a categorical error, because there is no such thing as having more than one value means inherent contradiction. As a result, a purely rationalist perspective is ineffective. You can only achieve a certain level of rationality. Which is already exactly what people have been doing for millenia, trying to find the most logical way to follow their values, and trying to phrase their inherent, base values into a set of explicit values that represent them as well as possible. It's not anything different from what secular philosophy has done for over 4000 years now if you construe it that way. Finally, it's never possible to know that your system is without any contradiction, because that would be equivalent to solving the halting problem. So, do you have a notion that contradiction can be estimated? Measured? How do you come to the conclusion that your belief system, with that contradiction removed, is any less contradictory than before, knowing full well that you might have introduced a more complex, as of yet unknown contradiction, or ten thousand of them? And so it seems that having soft contradictions is not actually necessarily a bad thing, and that jumping to resolve them should only be done if they actually are terminal, because balancing contradictions in your cognitive process is actually very doable and a good tool. It's not just about information either, even with perfect knowledge it's impossible to be sure of the absence of contradiction. In other words, it's never possible to prove a the consistency of a model in that model itself. You can try to prove it using the framework of another model, but how do you know that that model is consistent? You can't. This is why I personally try to ground the internal consistency of my though process in the material world - a contradiction is only problematic if resolving it can materially improve the situation or understanding I derive from it. But then again, Philosophical materialism vs idealism is a whole other can of worms, so il leave it to that very small facet of it.
  - chrchang523 6y ago
    It is not necessary to resolve all contradictions in one's beliefs and values to gain some benefit from rational introspection. Even professional physicists haven't arrived at a consensus on how general relativity and quantum mechanics fit together; that doesn't make the internal consistency of those two models worthless.
Def_Os 6y ago
What's your take on Harris' The Moral Landscape?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  I find it pretty much useless. It's just a confused case for rule utilitarianism, an age old moral framework, that makes some good arguments for it but fixes none of its problems. Overall, the central claim is unproven. To make the central claim worthwhile, Harris would have to find a way to measure well-being. Since he can't, there is really no difference between that and bog standard utilitarianist ethics.

chrchang523 6y ago

I don't see how the disagreeing students in Varoufakis's classes are irrational. There are at least four reasonable explanations I can think of for their behavior. 1. They perceive a tail risk that at least one student is willing to spite the others. Possibly a student that has less to lose from bad grades than their classmates do, but that's not the only context where it could happen. While an assumption that everyone has the same values and will make the optimal choice under those values often leads to an effective approximation, modeling human behavior isn't always that simple... especially when only one person has to deviate for your model to make a catastrophically wrong prediction. 2. Grades aren't quite on an absolute scale; at least when pushed to extremes like "everyone in the class gets an A+", the most sophisticated readers of the transcripts will interpret that A+ differently than an A+ in the same class where the distribution of grades was more typical. 3. Getting yourself to behave in your long-term self-interest isn't always trivial. People do things like publicly commit to donating to a cause they hate if they don't achieve goal X, to try to increase their chance of reaching that goal when they've wanted to but failed in the past. Meaningful grades can be better than their absence if you struggle with self-control and trust the professor enough. 4. If you have a clear interest in seeing your classmates put effort into the course, you might vote against this. Note that, in some of these cases, the student has an incentive to be quiet about their primary motive and instead give the cover-story explanation Varoufakis heard. I don't think those cases are likely (I think it really is mostly #1), but I wouldn't rule them out.

js8 6y ago
The disagreeing students are rational and irrational at the same time; their rationality forces them to act irrationally. That's why it is a paradox, kind of similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_paradox Of course you can argue about the details in particular situation, just like you can explain that the card is not really a paradox, as the statements were written by different people, etc. The main reason why I pointed out the story is that it is a certain answer to the question, why are not rational people (more) successful? We can easily imagine a class of "irrational" students, who take the Varoufakis' proposal, all get their good grades, and move on to other tasks, beating the hardcore rationalists in the process.

biolurker1 6y ago

Varoufakis is not only very irrational but mentally ill and I take full responsibility for saying this.