What is your rationality blind spot?

If I only had a single blind spot... But probably the most prominent is that I can't stop feeling inside that life is guided by some sort of coherent narrative. E.G., I've had some hard times in the last few years, but very recently I got lucky and found a really good job (and considering the situation of the job market in Italy this means REALLY lucky). I just can't stop feeling that I somewhat deserved it, via the usual narrative pattern of great difficulties -> final reward. It's a very subtle mechanism, and I very often fail to notice that my mind is organizing what happens into a pseudo-coherent pattern. This sometimes leads to very stupid decisions, like not going out with friends because it doesn't properly fit with my schedule (even if I can accomodate it with some efffort), and so it wasn't meant to be. I'm working on it at the moment, but it will probably be a long way to eliminate the blind spot.

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Eating is one mentioned here before; I definitely eat more candy than I should. I have been trying to cut back but it is just sooo easy to eat it all the time.

Seeking out third alternatives in practical day-to-day matters seems to be something I'm bad at. As a specific example: I recently had to make a fairly large trip to see my family for the holidays, but they live in the boonies and I don't have a car, so taking public transit is very inconvenient. Many times I've taken the bus about halfway and gotten a ride the other half, but there was a bit of a problem with the timing and we ended up having to drive through rush hour traffic and in the dark most of the way. After I finished the trip, I was complaining about it to a friend, and she said "why didn't you just go to craigslist for a rideshare?"

I need a way of telling myself to brainstorm for five minutes on types of solutions to my problems, rather than specifying large parts of how to solve them and then being disappointed by how inflexible it is.

Habitual despair. It's hard for me to believe that what I can do will work out well enough to make it worth doing. This isn't true for all areas of my life, but it's pretty pervasive.

Even though I have made significant progress (via a randomizer), I still engage in folk activism far too much. I know this is completely irrational since it doesn't have enough effect on the world to make it worth the effort and it makes people like me less on the chance (which is extremely high) that I say something that outs me as not being a member of the relevant in-group (which may harm my other goals), but it comes so naturally to me and feels like the right thing to do while it is happening.

I don't think I handle fear very rationally. Here are a few examples:

I remember at one point I had to point out to myself that while existential risk was a problem, it wasn't a problem that I could solve with a single adrenaline rush, so losing sleep over it because I was tensed up was not going to help anyone and would just make me a worse worker and thinker. Now instead, I wake up in the middle of the night convinced I have this other idea that simply MUST be thought about and solved because I have an entirely fresh perspective on some other problem and I need to flesh out this idea, and if I go right back to sleep I will forget about it, which means I'm doing the exact same thing I did with existential risk, but with other things.

This idea is usually coherent, but never as impressive or irreplaceable as I convince myself in my head, I have yet to actually act on any of the ideas, and in some cases, I even read a news article later that relates to people who have not only had the idea but have actually prototyped it already. Which means that if I forget them, it's not a big loss. Yet I keep losing sleep over the fact that I have to think about them.

I think there are a number of other cases where my reaction to a risk is still entirely overblown for no reason that I can currently figure out. Things like "I made a small mistake at work. I'm probably going to get fired." or "My wife and I got into a small argument where I raised my voice. She's probably going to divorce me." or "I worry about things too much, I'm going to give myself an early heart attack from stress."

I think a much more realistic and likely fear that I think would be more rational to address first is "I'm going to get into a car accident because I don't sleep well enough at night" (Partially because of being too busy worrying but there are other reasons too.) I should probably devote the vast majority of my worrying to that, which means I shouldn't worry about it because one good way to help solve that problem is to relax.

Delegating tasks. At work we're now short-staffed, and I've had to pick up work from a couple people.

Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I'm most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?

It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.

Akrasia, pure and simple. Procrastination is my fiercest foe.

Even though I'm pretty sure that taking better care of myself physically (going to the gym, getting more sleep, improving diet, trying out supplements and nootropics) would probably make me happier and smarter all the time, I still don't do it. That's probably a pretty awful thing.

The inability to adhere to a healthy diet in the face of food seems like the immediately worst one, since it seems liable to cause me to die early.

Presumably there are many others, but being blind spots, they're hard to think of. No doubt I'll go "Oh yes, that's me too" to a lot of the other comments.

I try to go through the cognitive bias list calling to mind past examples of me falling for them. I know I'm smart, but it's very important to accuracy to be closely in touch with my own stupidity.

"You don't understand a cognitive bias until you know you have it yourself" sounds highly plausible, and may even be true. You'll certainly know it better than you would only from others.

I behave as if I'm living in a tribe of 100 people and thus have a reputation/consistency of identity to maintain. As a consequence I treat low cost actions as if they were high cost.

I find I have very little access to my own motivation algorithms, so that things I think I want to do and things I actually end up doing do not always align very well. External deadlines (as opposed to self-imposed ones) are some of the only things that consistently motivate me, but they don't work very well for personal goals.

I can't work out what my central desires are and how to apply them to making major life choices. Not sure if this means I don't have any or have some mental block stopping me acknowledging them. (Bluntly, I don't know what I want).

Possibly as a consequence I feel bound by social obligations and have difficulty refusing to do things. I am instrumentally rational in fulfilling them though.

I'm unreasonably scared of doing anything that would make social waves (fear of rejection, fear of dissent, etc.).

I can't see mine, but I have a fact that seems very likely to help pointing in the right direction: I can't seem to find any USE of rationality, and thus cant do any kind of trials or calibrations. I never have to make non-obvious decisions with large enough stakes to be worth spending more than 5 seconds on. Most large scale important things like long term goals I've just read from the sequences and don't need determining myself. I never seem to need a truth I can't just get from goggle. Outside of artistic output there seem to be almost no indications I'm generally intelligent. Possessing any kind of system 2 thinking seems to be a clear net negative for me, I'm almost always better of acting on instinct and naive heuristics.

Obviously, it can't reasonably BE that way, but it SEEMS that way from the inside, and the illusion is extraordinarily robust and complete.

Alcohol.

I think I have case of rationalisation paranoia. But I might just be rationalizing. . . I think the problem may be that when I try to solve/find solutions to problems that have a big impact on how I view the world on a fundamental level i.e. things I think are important, I get emotional. Then I start to want a specific worldview/theory to be true, but since I know that I want a specific theory to be right, I become very suspicious about every argument in favor my preferred theory. In the end my judgment becomes severely clouded and I can't tell what feels like a plausible argument form what is a plausible argument. Even if I conclude that theory A is right (the preferred theory), I still feel like I just rationalized (I might just be). What's extra problematic is that this approach has give fruit during my childhood (e.g. thinking about supernatural stuff and the likes).

I'm still reading EY:s sequence "How To Actually Change Your Mind" so I might just resolve this meta-confusion . . .

I signal disloyalty all the time by questioning social norms or being a contrarian in a non-approved way.

I spend all my time analyzing the problem and never move on to the solution phase.

I'm still unable to focus on a difficult long term goal. If to some task I do not see easy short term steps towards at least some small visible success I tend to form an Ugh-field about it and procrastinate until I forget the task.

What I should be doing is to make a long term plan of something and then try to feel comfortable only doing one small step per day. If anybody has an idea I'd be happy to hear it.

Paranoia. Humans are doing everything on purpose in "my world".

Not sure if these count as "blind sports" or other sorts of flaws, but off the top of my head, a couple would be akrasia and also, well, remembering to use what rationality I have when I actually need it.

(ie, remembering that politics is the mind killer BEFORE getting into an argument, as a simple example.)

Um, let's see, what else. Hard to say, since, well, the true blind spots would be the ones I wouldn't know about, right?

There're many ways which I fail to apply what I know in theory, but a lot of that would be covered by "akrasia and failing to remember it when I need it."

1) I get too invested in my own ways of doing things, especially learning things, even when I know my way is not optimal and copying someone else's routine would probably make me improve better.

2) I'm mostly motivated by wanting to impress others and be better than others, even though I know from experience that achieving these goals isn't all it's cracked up to be. This means I tend to slow down when I'm at or near the top, even if I could keep on improving beyond that.