Self-conscious ideology

My favorite self-conscious ideology is Continental Rationalism. The main idea is that the world is built on logic and harmony which can be understood by an individual human mind. It was born from religious mysticism (Descartes, Leibniz) but somehow became very fruitful in science. Competing ideologies like "the world is built on chance" or "all understanding is social" don't bear nearly as much fruit, though they sound more sophisticated. Maybe it's because they discourage you from trying to understand things by reason, while CR encourages it. Heck, I think even LW ideology loses out to CR, because self-improvement feels like a grind, while understanding the world feels like a quest. Maybe if LW focused for a while on understanding things instead of defeating akrasia and such, it'd be a happier place.

I think it would be very worthwhile to study which assumptions are actually shared. We could have a poll where we list 50 assumptions and everyone states on a Likert state to what extent they agree.

It would also be interesting to see whether there are other clusters besides a basic "rational ideology" cluster.

If you take a random set of people, they will have various beliefs, and some of those will be more common than others. Calling that an ideology sems unfair. By the way, all beliefs have criticisms and yet some beliefs are more correct than others.

Also, "it's likely that some of the beliefs I hold are wrong" is already one rationalist assumption, or at least it should be. What are you adding to that?

You reminded me of a tangentially related post idea I want someone to steal: "Ideologies as Lakatosian Research Programmes".

Just as people doing science can see themselves as working within a scientific research programme, people doing politics can see themselves as working within a political research programme. Political research programmes are scientific/Lakatosian research programmes generalized to include normative claims as well as empirical ones.

I expect this to have some (mildly) interesting implications, but I haven't got round to extracting them.

I think Eliezer once wrote something about things becoming clearer when you think about how you would program a computer to do it, as opposed to e.g. just throwing some applause lights to a human. So, how specifically would you implement this kind of belief in a computer?

Also, should we go meta and say: "'Rationality gives us a better understanding of the world, except when it does not' is a good ideology, except when it is worse" et cetera?

What exactly would that actually mean? (Other than verbally shielding yourself from criticism by endless "but I said 'except when not'".) Suppose a person A believes "there is a 80% probability it will rain tomorrow", but a person B believes "there is a 80% probability it will rain tomorrow, except if it is some different probability". I have an idea about how A would bet about tomorrow's weather, but how would B?