A friend recently asked me what does it mean that I identify as a rationalist and I didn't really have a coherent response. This is my attempt to assemble a set of intuitions and pointers on what I mean by that and to synthesize them into a more legible answer.
(The current state of this page is a very rough draft and mostly - "has a bunch of assembled pointers and not much synthesis")
I'm not trying to create an accurate representation of what an average member of rationality community would subscribe to, but to outline what I aspire to when I say that this is part of my identity.
Rationality is about winning
At a very high level rationality is about figuring out how to be systematically better at achieving your goals.
A big aspect of that is setting up processes that
lead you to systematically believe true things about the world. epistomology
lead you to make better decisions on a margin
Pointers
Rationalists work hard towards believing true things (having good Epistemology)
awareness and effort to avoid common errors in thinking cognitive bias
More likely to use quantitative thinking, explicit probabilities for things
Bayesian reasoning
broad skeptical mindset
When you hear something - you would evaluate it against your models of the world
and you should be surprised by fiction more then reality
establishing social norms that promote the above
in as much as there is rationalist milieu
socially encouraging the updating of beliefs in face of new evidence, applaud people changing their mind.
ask people for quantitative estimates
encourage truth-seeking discussion norms
Being more systematic about figuring out what's true, or making decisions can sometimes be (or seem) more effortful
Important to know when it's worth spending more time optimizing your decision vs going with your current best guess
or when it's the correct choice to go with your intuition vs explicit reasoning
this is very big and impactful on the everyday basis
"it's worth reducing/increasing probability of this relatively unlikely thing"
The thing I'm doing to improve blah is not perfect, but it's better than not doing anything
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multidimensional understanding of problems
Questioning the established norms while understanding that sometimes rules and traditions exist for a reason Chesterton’s Fence
broadly understanding of limits to legibility/reasoning disconnected from experimentation/feedback
common misconceptions
rationality != lack of emotion
Emotions guide you to discover what is valuable for you in life and rationality helps you get closer to you values
These aren’t the concessions we make when we can’t be rational. They’re what being rational means.
Disregarding the value of intuitive thinking
unfortunate name overlap with historical (Descartes) rationalism
rationality in everyday practice
better habits
it’s an evolving art
what outlined here is snapshot in time (probably outdated vs SOTA)
most of the things I mention are downflow of “systematized winning”
so it evolves over time as we improve our understanding of how humans work, develop better tools, etc
These aren’t the concessions we make when we can’t be rational. They’re what being rational means.