Metarationality: a messy introduction

This post tries to address 'all we got were these lousy Kegan levels' critiques of metarationality by pointing at a bunch of interesting concrete topics and shouting excitedly.

It's pretty long, tl;dr below:

• How we think we think, vs. how we actually think: if you look closely at even the most formal types of reasoning, what we're actually doing doesn't tend to look so rigorous and logical.

• Still, on its own that wouldn't preclude the brain doing something very rigorous and logical behind the scenes, in the same way that we don't consciously know about the image processing our brain is doing for our visual field. Some discussion of why the prospects for that don't look great either.

• Dumb confused interlude on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

• The cognitive flip: queering the inside-the-head/outside-the-head binary. Sarah Perry's theory of mess as a nice example of this.

• Through fog to the other side: despite all this confusion, we can navigate anyway.