If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?

If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?

Yup, because there are probably some pretty damned good reasons -- no pun intended -- for jumping off the cliff, like that I have a parachute strapped to my back and an impending explosion will kill all people still on the cliff.

If there weren't good reasons that were similarly persuasive, then it wouldn't be reasonable.

You're employing the classical division of reason versus empiricism. While I do have criticized this forum's emphasis on reason before, your critique seems to be off the mark. This site is devoted to rationality, not pure reason as such, and rationality uses whatever mix of reason and empiricism that achieves the best results. You're making the assumption that Eliezer relies only on reason and not enough on evidence, but you (ironically given your position) aren't providing any evidence to back up the claim.

Suppose there is an optimal mix of reason and empiricism for a specific domain. If you suspect somebody's mix of the two seems to be wrong, you need to first show that the optimal mix for that domain is what you think it to be, and then that your opponent is leaning too much in one direction. You can't just say "my opponent is wrong" and then parade a long list of failures which you believe were caused by too much reason. That's a fully general counterargument.

"Reason" does not appear to be the right term here. "Cleverness" comes to mind as a better substitute, though I suspect there are better terms. The banking crisis occurred because people thought they were too clever. The various problematic causes you mention all appear to overestimate their own cleverness. It's also unclear to me what it would mean for them to rely on reason less, and how this would cause their worldview to better match reality.

I think this might be best phrased as an objection to an overreliance on clever theories and a tendency to eschew evidence in favor of cleverness. Insofar as that is your point, it is an excellent if not novel one. But the way this is phrased is a bit more antagonistic than I think is merited, and seems to attack a type of thought rather than a specific error that a type of thought is prone to.

If my semantic distinction does not make sense, let me just explain my connotations. When I hear "reason," I tend to think of it much like "rational;" one definitionally cannot make a mistake through being too rational, in that rationality is the thing that having more of it causes you not to make mistakes. "Cleverness," on the otherhand, brings the same intellectual sleight-of-hand without any connotation of accuracy. The sentence, "Bob lost all his money because he was too reasonable," does not really make sense, whereas, "Bob lost all of his money because he was too clever," does. A good example of being too clever would be the demise of Vizzini from the Princess Bride.

Jane Galt also rails against reason when explaining why she does not support gay marriage.

Seems like a fairly blatant category error to even mention that in this context.

You're confusing "reason" with inappropriate confidence in models and formalism.

The most recent financial crisis is a another example of what happens when reason is allowed to dominate. Cutting away all the foggy noise & conspiracy theories, the root cause of the financial crisis was that men who believed a little too much in reason became divergent from reality and reality quickly reminded them of that.

How can you say reason failed them, when they made so much money?

In reply to Eliezer's Contrarian Status Catch 22 & Sufficiently Advanced Sanity. I accuse Eliezer of encountering a piece of Advanced Wisdom.

This post is indistinguishable from 'Advanced Wisdom'. I accuse you of not really understanding that of which you speak. Even if you are, in fact, advanced and wise you will need to do some background reading here in order to understand the posts here that you may enlighten the authors.

By way of answer to your rhetorical question: Yes, I would jump of a cliff if reason told me to.

The problem was not that the models were wrong, it was that what they were trying to accomplish was unmodelable. Nassim Nicholas-Taleb's The Black Swan explains this far better than I can.

My reading of Taleb's book was the opposite: he says quite explicitly that the finance models behind the crash were wrong, being based on Gaussian distributions, which did not fit the phenomena being modelled. He contrasts the Gaussian with power-law distributions, although I admit I don't know if he has done any mathematical modelling of the finance markets using those.

In many situations, there is a "no action" safe default action, which you can take as a matter of epistemic hygiene. Then, overconfidence is dangerous and doubt is a virtue. In other cases, this heuristic is not as commendable.

I think you really meant to argue that (outside of mathematics) each link in a chain of inference has a small chance of going wrong, so longer chains are exponentially less likely to be correct than shorter ones. This is well known around here, though hubris does take the better of us sometimes!

Read through the sequences, dammit.

The problem was not that the models were wrong, it was that what they were trying to accomplish was unmodelable.

[...]

Fundamentally, I believe that the world is unreasonable. It is, at it's core, not amenable to reason. Better technique may push the failure point back just a bit further but it will never get rid of it.

Since you mentioned Scott Aaronson, you might want to have a look at this post.

Maybe someone could clear this up a bit for me, but...

I had always thought that reason was a method of formalized thinking that weighed evidence and logic in coming to the most likely or most preferable conclusion.

Whereas...

Rationality is reasoning within a formal system, and following the consequences of the beliefs of that formal system.

I realize that my attempt to define these two terms is probably flawed to a degree, but I am still new at much of the terminology.

Edit: is there some form of coding by which I might use italics, bold, underlining, quoting, links, etc.? I see that others have used these, yet the norms for these styles don't seem to work here.

If reason told me to jump off a cliff would I?

Interesting question. I'm tempted to say yes. If by jumping off a cliff, I can save the lives of 20 other people, then yes. I certainly should. I'm not going to say that I would, I'm a much a victim of acrasia as anyone.

It's quite hard to evaluate this post with any precision, but I find it reasonable to assign 23.432774% probability that it is a genuine piece of Advanced Wisdom. Accordingly I choose +1, with an estimated expected benefit of 235.74637 utilons plus 54.747746 warm fuzzies.

This problem-solving by brute-force data acquisition might be the new direction / perspective science is waiting to be ready for. From what I've witnessed here on Less Wrong (this, for example), despite intelligent discussion; reasoning on complex issues rarely gets one closer to correct; either one knew and knows or they didn't and don't -- presumably this knowledge is based on having or not having a set of experiences and the right data (evidence).

On the other hand ... I'm still an advocate of reasoning to, just as you said, bridge that last gap between what we know and what we need to know. Regarding the necessary use of reasoning, I recall this post about using reasoning when necessary, to some extent minimally and optimally.

Later edit: Here, I am using the term 'reasoning' in a narrower way as 'making up theories' as sort of the traditional/idealistic scientific approach to making hypotheses around the data, instead of just letting the data speak for itself. I inferred this use from the original post.