Instrumental Rationality is a Chimera

There is no such thing as instrumental rationality. What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee? Drive a car? Raise a child? Conduct a particle physics experiment?

The rational way to do all of these things is to discover and do what it physically requires to achieve them. To be constrained by how the world is, as opposed, for example, to merely wishing for buttered toast, saying the name of God over the espresso machine, driving straight out into heavy traffic the first time you sit behind a steering wheel, beating a baby to make it stop crying, or neglecting the study of all the mathematics, physics, engineering, and management necessary to build and run the LHC.

I am not seeing the problem here. There is such an art, and OB and LW are about it.

Rather than racking their brains in an attempt to come up with something novel to say on the topic of abstract rationalism, we should encourage contributors to tell us about something they specialise in, to give us advice backed by evidence and reasoned argument about something they know a lot about, and to direct us to useful references wherein we may learn more.

I agree. We need war stories (if that's not an off-puttingly masculine way of describing it) in addition to generalities. "The Art must have a purpose other than itself."

Bodies creating software or hardware specifications sometimes make the following rule: no specification without implementation. Anyone proposing something for the spec must also demonstrate an implementation. The principle can be widely applied.

I don't have a war story to add to this post though. Today, like most working days, I will apply myself to various mathematical and programming tasks at work, but I doubt anyone wants to hear about finite element modelling or GUI design on LW. In the evening I will do various other things not of consequence here. Where is rationality being applied? Well, where would it not be being applied?

There is no such thing as instrumental rationality. What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee? Drive a car? Raise a child? Conduct a particle physics experiment?

Using a very informal definition of rationality as the opposite of irrationality, is there an irrational way to butter toast? If so, does it not imply a rational way to butter toast?

Agreed, definitely. While I've found that Eliezer's posts, in general, have given me a general sense of thinking more clearly, but beyond enjoying that I haven't been able to make much use. I'm reminded of Robin's posts on marginal medical spending, which leave me thinking "OK, I'm convinced... what am I actually supposed to do about this?"

What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee?

Heh, I and my wife recently did some experiments with our coffee consumption, which resulted in our switching from our long-preferred brand ("Davidoff") to a cocktail made out of two brands.

The first brand ("Cubana") is relatively expensive, poor-flavored, poor-tasting but well-caffeinated and the second one ("Jardin") is relatively cheap, good-tasting, good-flavored but less caffeinated. We mix them 50/50 when we want more caffeine (rarely) or 30/70 when we want good balance of flavor, caffeine and taste (most of the time).

The reason we started exploring brands other than Davidoff was because its counterfeit percentage (as subjectively perceived by us) was above 33%, which is too high for a relatively expensive brand. We started exploring around and quickly learned than cheap brands almost always taste like crap, so we reallocated our coffee exploration budget to favor mid-range and expensive brands. The expensive brands usually failed to provide good price/performance ratio, so we settled on mid-range, where we finally found "Jardin" and "Cubana".

To sum up, we minimized the cost, maximized taste, flavor and caffeine content, and made the scheme adaptable for our current needs (caffeine vs. taste).

I didn't explicitly record P(brandX|goodtaste) and P(cheap|goodtaste), but I have a feeling that I'll try that sometime on some similarly silly subject -- just for the sheer fun of it :)

One important point was missing however, a point raised by Yvain last week under the title, Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great. That fact is that we have not done anything yet. Eliezer writes under the assumption that women ought to want to study our writings, but since we have so far failed to produce a single practical application of our rationalist techniques, I really cannot blame women for staying away. They may be being more rational than we are.

Philip Greenspun hypothesizes something similar for the under-representation of women in hard sciences. Scott Aaronson disagrees.

(Of course, just because LW isn't helping one with instrumental rationality doesn't mean it's irrational for one to read it; maybe one is reading it because it's fun, and the fun is worth the time spent on it.)

I agree for the most part with Tom. Here's a quote from an article that I drafted last night but couldn't post due to my karma:

"I read comments fairly regularly that certainly imply that people are less successful or less fulfilled than they might be (I don't want to directly link to any but I'm sure you can find them on any thread where people start to talk about their personal situation). Where are the posts that give people rational ways to improve their lives? It's not that this is particularly difficult - there's a huge psychological literature on various topics (for instance happiness, attraction and influence) that I'm sure people here have the expertise to disseminate. And it would have obvious applications in making people more successful and fulfilled in their day to day lives.

It seems to me that the Less Wrong community concentrates on x-rationality, which is a larger and more intellectually stimulating challenge (and, cynically, better for signalling intellectual prowess) at the expense of simple instrumental rationality. It's as if we think that because we're thinking about black belt x-rationality, we're above applying blue belt instrumental rationality.

In my life I'm constantly learning new and more accurate models with which to understand the world that don't come near to determining whether to one or two box in pure complexity terms. They are useful more often, though.

This isn't to denigrate x-rationality. Obviously its important but it currently seems like there's no balance on LW between that and instrumental rationality. As a side benefit I'll bet good money that the best way to get people interested in rationality is to simply show them how successful you are when applying it - something that would be more possible with instrumental rationality than x-rationality."

I disagree with Tom over the terminology though. I quite like the terms x-rationality and instrumental rationality because they allow me to easily talk about two broad types of rational thought even though i would be hard pressed to draw a specific line between them.

One important point was missing however, a point raised by Yvain last week under the title, Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great. That fact is that we have not done anything yet.

Why are there more men standing around doing nothing as opposed to women standing around doing nothing? I am not sure how your post addresses the question of the apparent gender imbalance.

Long have we pondered Eliezer's enigmatic homily, “Rationalists should win.” and like the aristoteleans of old we agreed that it must be so, since a proclivity to win is inherent in the definition of the word “rationalist”.

If you've been reading this site, you've seen repeated objections, including my own, to this definition.

There is no such thing as instrumental rationality.

There is no such thing as non-instrumental rationality; for it would not be rational. It would be an arbitrarily-chosen value.

I agree that we could use some more domain-specific essays. That said, I think you're undervaluing the pure philosophy and cognitive psychology side of this site's writings.

That fact is that we have not done anything yet.

Less Wrong is only a blog. The only thing it can ever hope to achieve is to produce some good essays. The people who read those essays may go on to achieve things, but those only reflect on them personally, not on Less Wrong.

The attempt to develop a grand unified theory of instrumental rationality is an attempt to abstract away from the details of individual circumstances, in order to come up with a Best Way To Do Everything Forever.

No, that is expressly disavowed by the site's title. All progress is incremental; it isn't possible to be completely right, only to be less wrong, or less often wrong.

What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee? Drive a car? Raise a child? Conduct a particle physics experiment? You will notice that the unifying feature among these examples is that there is no unifying feature among these examples.

Um, yes there is. In all cases, the rational way is the way that produces predictably suitable results relative to your desired level of utility and/or investment for that result. And in general, the procedures you use will be defined by testing according to some predefined criteria, after being generated through creative and/or problem-solving processes.

And that, more or less, is the skillset (or at least the rough scope of such a skillset) of instrumental rationality.

You do not need academic-grade rationality every second of the day and you do not need to pretend that you are the only rational person in the world.

Agreed.

In order to live rationally and live well, we must have easy access to organised expert domain knowledge in useful areas such as self-motivation, health and fitness, development of social skills, use of technology

But if you don't know how to hypothesize, measure, and test, you have no way to sort that domain knowledge for usefulness to you.

and of course, the abstract rules of epistemic rationality.

What are these, exactly?