Rationally Irrational

When you see an oak tree and when you think about an oak tree it triggers the same series of neural impulses in your brain. Athletes visualize their actions before doing them, and this provides real benefits to achieving those actions. For humans, there is never any "physical oak leaf" there is only ever constructs.

Okay I think I understand what you're trying to say. So let's go back to our hypothetical observer outside the universe, looking in at the source code. (Not that this is possible, but I find it clarifies my thinking and what I'm trying to say.) The human is looking at an oak tree. The observer is looking at the human's brain, and sees that certain neurons are sending signals to other neurons. The human is closing their eyes and visualizing an oak tree. There's a similar but not identical neural pattern going on–I find the subjective experience of visualizing an oak tree using my imagination isn't quite the same as the experience of looking at one, but the neural firing is probably similar.

Now the human keeps their eyes closed, and the outside-the-universe hypothetical observer looks at the oak tree, which is made out of cellulose, not neurons. The oak tree starts to fall down. In the neural representations in the human's head, the oak tree isn't falling down, because last time he looked at it, it was nice and steady. He keeps his eyes closed, and his earplugs in, and the oak tree falls on his head and he dies. Up until the moment he died, there was no falling oak tree in his mental representation. The information had no sensory channel to come in through. Does that mean it didn't exist for him, that there was never any "physical oak tree?" If so, what killed him?

I think the LessWrong overall attitude to this is comparable to a bunch of observers saying "gee, wouldn't it have been nice if he'd kept his eyes open, and noticed the tree was falling, and gotten out of the way?" The philosophy behind it is that you can influence what goes into your mental representations of the world (I'll stop calling it "map" to avoid triggering your 'modern equivalent of the soul' detector). If you keep your eyes closed when walking in the forest (or you don't get around to going to the doctor and getting a mammogram or a colonoscopy, or [insert example here]), you get hit by falling trees (or your cancer doesn't get detected until it's Stage 5, at which point you might as well go straight to palliative care).

For me there's something basically wrong with claiming that something doesn't exist if no human being knows about it. Was the core of the planet solid before any human knew it was molten? Is an asteroid going to decide not to hit the Earth after all, just because no telescopes were pointed outwards to look for it? What we don't know does hurt us. It hurts us plenty.

Granted, the 'map and territory' claim, along with many other analogies rampant on LW, was aimed more at topics where their is fairly clear evidence for a particular position (say, evolution), and people have ideological reasons not to believe it. But it goes just as well for topics where no human being knows anything yet. They're still out there.

In another comment, you said that you don't think hard science is possible. (Forgive me if i'm misquoting.) Since our entire debate has been pretty much philosophy and words, let's go for some specifics. Do you think research in hard science will stop advancing, or that is should stop advancing? If so, why?

When you see an oak tree and when you think about an oak tree it triggers the same series of neural impulses in your brain.

Correct.

For humans, there is never any "physical oak leaf" there is only ever constructs.

Incorrect.

To understand the distinction, note this passage from The Simple Truth:

Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.

'belief' corresponds to 'map'; 'reality' corresponds to 'territory'.

In my opinion, the endless pursuit of technical knowledge and efficiency is not beneficial.

I definitely think we are capable of transforming reality and learning more about it, I just don't think this process of transformation is in itself beneficial.

I'm starting to get a feeling that our disagreement is more ideological than factual in nature.

I'm reading between the lines a lot here, but I'm getting the feeling that you think that although: a) you can look at the world from a reductionist, the-territory-is-out-there-to-study way, and b) you can make scientific progress that way, BUT c) scientific progress isn't always desirable, THUS d) if you use your own world-view (the oak leaf in your head is the only reality), then e) we can focus more on developing aesthetic knowledge, which is desirable.

What would you say is an example of aesthetic knowledge? How would you describe a world that has too much tech knowledge compared to aesthetic knowledge? How would you describe a world that has a healthy balance of both?

Side note:

I'm a nursing student. A lot of what we learn about is, I think, what you would call 'aesthetic knowledge'. I'm not supposed to care very much about why or why not a patient's cancer responds to treatment. That's up to the medical specialists who actually know something about cancer cells and how they grow and metabolize. I'm supposed to use caring and my therapeutic presence to provide culturally sensitive support, provide for my patient's self-care needs, use therapeutic communication, etc. (You may detect a slight note of sarcasm. I don't like classes that use words like 'therapeutic communication' or 'culturally sensitive' and then don't give us any examples or teach us how.)

And yeah, a lot of medical doctors are kind of tactless and not very caring, even though they're right about the diagnostic, and that's not very nice for patients. But it's not the technological advance that causes their callousness; it's the fact that some human beings don't know how to be nice to others. Society needs to work on that. But that doesn't mean society shouldn't work on a better cure for cancer because it will make doctors arrogant.

There are lots of consequentialist reasons to think twice about rapid progress. Like: we don't always understand what we're doing until we've done it and 50 years later there's a huge hole in the ozone layer. Is that enough for me to unilaterally oppose progress? No. I was a breech baby–I'd have died at birth if I was born 100 years ago–and I kinda like being alive.

Doesn't sound familiar.

Regardless, I agree that if I value an N% improvement in skill A and skill B equivalently (either in and of themselves, or because they both contribute equally to some third thing I value), and an N% improvement in A takes much more effort than an N% improvement in B, that I do better to devote my resources to improving A.

Of course, it doesn't follow from that that for any skill A, I do better to devote my resources to improving A.

I think it comes from having done athletics as a kid... I was a competitive swimmer, and very quickly it became an obvious fact to me that in order to achieve the big abstract goal (being the fastest and winning the race) you had to train a whole lot. And since it's not very easy for someone who's 11 or 12 years old to wake up every morning at 5 and make it to practice, I turned those into little mini subgoals (examples subgoal: get out of bed and make it to all the practices, subgoal: try to keep up with the fast teenage boys in my lane, subgoal: do butterfly even though it hurts).

So it just feels incredibly obvious to me that the bigger a goal is, the harder you have to train, and so my first thought is 'how do I train for this?'

But it certainly seems reasonable for me to, for example, not consume all available resources in pursuit of my currently articulable goals without some reasonable expectation of more resources being made available as a consequence of achieving those goals.

Is that an example of a system of regulation or type of limitation on the degree of accuracy I am willing to strive for my current goal orientation?

Yes in a sense. What I was getting at is that the implementation of rationality , when one's capacity for rationality is high (i.e when someone is really rational), is a HUGE consumption of resources. That

1.) Because goal-orientations are dynamic 2.) The implementation of genuine rational methodology to a goal-orientation consumes a huge amount of the individual/group's resources 3.) Both individuals and groups would benefit from having a system of regulating when to implement rational methodology and to what degree in the pursuit of a specific goal.

This is what my essay is about. This is what I call rational irrationality, or rationally irrational; because I see that a truly rational person for the sake of resource preservation and long-term (terminal) goal achievement would not want to achieve all their immediate goals in the fullest sense. This to me is different than having the goal of losing. Because you still want to achieve your goals, you still have immediate goals, you just do not place the efficient achievement of these goals as your top priority.