Deciding on our rationality focus

Upvoted for not being about gender.

If you ask me, the term "instrumental rationality" has been subject to inflation. It's not supposed to mean better achieving your goals, it's supposed to mean better achieving your goals by improving your decision algorithm itself, as opposed to by improving the knowledge, intelligence, skills, possessions, and other inputs that your decision algorithm works from. Where to draw the line is a matter of judgment but not therefore meaningless.

I'd like to add a third kind of rationality that seems popular in these circles: ''recreational rationality''. This would include things like the Prisoner's Dilemma, Newcomb's Paradox, the Monty Hall Problem, the "rationality quotes"-series and so forth.

Even though they are seldom useful in real-world decision making, they are simply ''interesting'' for many people that visit LW, I suspect -- including myself.

Upon reflection, this is exactly what sub-reddits are for. It should be trivial to turn on this functionality in the LW code, if that's a path we want to go down.

We seem to have a population here that already cares, and deeply, about rationality. I do trust them to upvote whatever has a lot to do with rationality and downvote whatever has too little to do with it. In fact, I'd go so far as to submit that we're doing something wrong if there aren't enough off-topic-ish, net-negative-karma posts; it would show that posters aren't taking quite enough risks as regards widening rationality's domain. I'm weary of the PUA and overly self-help-y talk, sure, but seeing nothing like it around here would be the dead canary in the coal mine.

Most self-help type stuff sucks. I consider self-help stuff at its best more useful than epistemic rationality stuff at its best, and I am optimistic that less wrong can produce self-help stuff at its best.

Just post it and see if it gets upvoted. We've got voting for a reason.

I would prefer a variation of bullet point number 3:

• Allow i-rationality discussion, but promote only when it is an application of a related, tightly coupled e-rationality concept.

I am here for e-rationality discussion. It's "cool" to know that deodorant is most effective when applied at night, before I go to bed, but that doesn't do anything to fundamentally change the way I think.

Upon some thought, I'd like the site to concentrate on e-rationality and throw out i-rationality. PUA, marketing, akrasia etc. have plenty of other sites dedicated to them. We should strive to make our own unique contribution in the general direction set by Eliezer and Robin on OB. I feel such a decision would make LW more interesting on average.

I thought of making a post of agreeing and disagreeing(and overall discussion), but then I encountered same kinda problem: I wasn't sure if it was on-topic, and when thinking further, I had trouble pin-pointing the exact topic I should be posting things on.

I'm still going to make that post, though. Eventually. I trust that you'll protect your garden, on case that one of the many possible things goes wrong.

My two cents on the actual topic here(Disclaimer, I'm a newb): I think difference with i and e is kinda like math and physics. Even if you knew everything about the world as it is(complete understanding of the physics), you'd wanna have efficient math to make use of that information. And even if you have all the mathematical understanding there ever could be, but you lacked any information about the world, the math would be useless. Winning is everything, and for that you need both instrumental and epistemic rationality.

The concept "achieving your values" doesn't deserve the term "instrumental rationality". If it does, then, as you point out, works about instrumental rationality are merely works about how to do stuff. You're giving a fancy new name to an old concept.

ETA: Not that that's always exactly what we mean when we say "instrumental rationality", of course ...

How about the given definition of "epistemic rationality"? This is also really general: it's how to know stuff. Granted, that's precisely what being less wrong means, but we're not interested in general education. Granted again, the top-rated post of all time, "Generalizing From One Example", is definitely epistemic rationality but not obviously any other type of rationality.

So, here I propose some other definitions of "rationality":

Aumann rationality: a person is Aumann rational if they are rational (don't interpret this circularly!), they believe other people are Aumann rational, and other people believe they are Aumann rational. Perfect Aumann rationality causes people to never disagree with each other, but it's a spectrum. Eliezer Yudkowsky is relatively Aumann rational; people on Less Wrong are expected to be quite Aumann rational with each other; people in political debates have very little Aumann rationality.

Rational neutrality: though people who are rational-neutral discard evidence regarding statements, as any intelligent being must, their decision whether to discard a piece of evidence or not is not based on the direction/magnitude of it--if they ignore an observation, they do so without first seeing what it is.

Krasia: quite unrelated to any other type of rationality, people with high krasia are good at going from believing that an action would result in high expected utility to actually taking that action.

I'm interested in both flavors of discussion, and especially in the relationship between them. It's hard to understand WHY consistent and world-matching epistemic beliefs don't AUTOMATICALLY cause winning instrumental behavior, and I think the difference is vital in figuring out the limits (and how to extend them) of our puny brains.

I'm also leery of too much meta control, especially when it seems to only hide rather than solve the underlying conflicts that are causing discomfort among some participants.

For these reasons, I prefer to avoid official policy and see what gets up-voted. There are interesting and thought-provoking posts on a wider variety of topics than I can predict in advance.

I think that it's pretty easy to sort out Instrumental rationality from general how-to's: Instrumental rationality is about your preferences, options, and decision making process.

If a how to article is primarily about how to do things in your skull, then it probably fits here. If the coupon article couldn't be rewritten to talk about arbitrary credit widgets used by pebblesorters, then it may not fit.

Honestly, ordinary self-help doesn't do anything like cost-benefit analysis even implicitly so it doesn't try to help people to achieve their values. Business literature does often do implicit cost-benefit analysis. The best video games are very unlikely to make any list of

"Allow i-rationality discussions, but require a stricter criteria for promoting top-level posts on the topic." I buy this.

"Allow i-rationality discussions, but try to somehow define the term so that silly things like listing the best video games of all time get excluded." I want generality in i-rationality discussions.