First impressions...

"but when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics, and one subthread went off to discuss the appropriateness of the term "gender equality".

Pretend doctors are attempting to come up with a metric for how well patients are who have a certain disease. Wouldn't the first step be to discuss whether the classification of the disease is correct and then to discuss what does it mean to measure progress with this disease? Your post for measuring how Trump is doing wasn't important in and of itself for improving the art of rationality, but it was useful in a meta way of providing an example of how you can measure progress.

And just in case you think I was being deliberately silly in my response to your Trump post, I teach economics at a women's college and when I discuss gender inequality in my microeconomics class I bring up some of the points I was trying to make with my response to your post.

We mostly don't do politics here. You'll probably get better outcomes posting about other stuff.

In being ironically guilty of not addressing your actual argument here, I'll point out that flaws of LW, valid or otherwise, aren't flaws of rationality. Rationality just means avoiding biases/fallacies. Failure can only be in the community.

I didn't read the original thread because politics. I'm somewhere between resentful and sad that you're judging a group of people for failing to solve your problem, which was under-specified and likely impossible.

All problems, if the right answer matters, SHOULD be broken down and analyzed - there is no "overanalyzed". Those questions that can't survive this are usually a mix of other problems, and resistance to analysis is a sign that the asker isn't seeking truth, but some other goal (see: politics).

There's not always time to fully break down and understand things you're interested in - understood. but acknowledging that you're looking for heuristics or shortcuts and doing the first level or two of breakdown into components is still the best approach if you're looking to understand the universe.

In summary: please keep political topics away from this site. If you're interested in decision theory or practical shortcuts and tricks to train your instincts to match your conscious beliefs, stick around.

and then people go on tangents only marginally relevant to the intent of the original article

I don't think I've ever seen any forum in which (1) informal unstructured discussions are commonplace and (2) what you just described doesn't happen. It may or may not be a bad thing, but it isn't the fault of rationality.

It's kind of funny - every post gets broken down into its tiniest constituents,

If you have 1000 line programme that crashes because of a bug in one line, do you focus on the one line or the other 999?

but when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics

This is actually the correct response.

It's trivially easy to generate tons of metrics -- hundreds of them. What's difficult is choosing the right ones. And which ones are the right ones? That depends. That depends on what do you want.

Without specifying what is it that you want to measure, the talk about metrics is premature. "Success" is not a specification.

I think you are conflating "is overly rational and insufficiently pragmatic" with "doesn't do what ArisC wants, on demand, in the way they want it done".

LW is a forum for discussing the art of rationality. It's not primarily a forum for discussing politics. If someone writes a post about politics that implies misconceptions about how we can determine causality, it makes sense to focus on the misconception about determining causality instead of ignoring it and stepping into the more political issues.

If you want the usual way to discuss politics there are plenty of other places on the internet.

If LW would simply debate politics on the term of every outsider to LW who wants to discuss politics on LW that would allow a lot of bad reasoning about politics into LW.

... of LW: a while ago, a former boss and friend of mine said that rationality is irrational because you never have sufficient computational power to evaluate everything rationally. I thought he was missing the point - but after two posts on LW, I am inclined to agree with him.

He's techinically correct on the first part, but what really bothers me is that while that statement is resource-aware, it totally disregards time. What can you do in 1, 2, 5, 10 minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years (remind me to edit this to include decades/centuries/milleniums in some time) that will help you achieve your goals?

It's kind of funny - every post gets broken down into its tiniest constituents, and these get overanalysed and then people go on tangents only marginally relevant to the intent of the original article.

Typical online discussions.. okay, no data to back it up..

This would be fine if the original questions of the post were answered; but when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics, and one subthread went off to discuss the appropriateness of the term "gender equality".

You've just had a taste of why discussing politics can get difficult and annoying.

I am new here, and I don't want to be overly critical of a culture I do not yet understand. But I just want to point out - rationality is a great tool to solve problems; if it becomes overly abstract, it kind of misses its point I think.

Not the first to bring it up. Just so you won't feel lonely: https://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/

I've been around in LW for years, and I'd say it's tended more towards refining the art of pragmatism than rationality (though there's a good bit of intersection there).

I think that one failure mode is to think that "rationality" is actually exist as an object in the outside world. But it is akin to mind projection fallacy. It is not an object. It is not even mathematical object, like the digits.

Defining rationality through winning is also not explaining what rationality is. Other things also could produce winning: luck, force, power, rules manipulation, personal effectiveness, genetics, risk taking, or number of trials. Or just interpretation of what is winning.

if some one wins, its is not strong evidence for his rationality. Many politicians, billionaires, sportsmen are winners from the point of views of their peers, but they are not best rationalists.

So, rationality is not a physical object, not mathematical object, and not something we could extract from solving game theory.

Rationality also is not intelligence, as no body knows what is intelligence (or they will be able to build AI).

So may be better to think of rationality as of idealised way of thinking, and not any, but the way of thinking which could be presented in the finite number of finite rules. The last distinction is important as there is another possibility: that best way of thinking is petabyte size neural network, which works great but no body knows how.

By defining rationality as best way of thinking which could be presented in finite set of rules, we hope that this definition would converge into a one and only finite object, the best set of rules, and in this case we would be able to say that rationality actually exist. It may not be true. It could produce several contradictioning sets of rules, or a set of rules for which we can't mathematically prove that it is actually the best possible set.

Rationality is like communism: the great project which not yet exist, but some steps could be done in its direction. Actual rationality will probably created only with AI.

Pretty much everyone is saying that this is a case of mismatched expectations: obviously from your point of view, it's others who are wrong.
I would object that rationality requires you to stop your immediate reaction and look at the thing from a meta-level: you've come to a place expecting something, instead it's another. Are you going to yell at reality and try to shame it into being something else?
You should simply re-evaluate your model and decide from there your course of action.

I agree. I am a blogger & I am active over several forums, once while discussing UGC NET Answer keys, suddenly people went gaga over the debate of right & wrong answers they recorded. And I was like what we were discussing & how did we came to this abrupt discussion. It is always small chunks that caught your attention & you resonate that in your verdict.

Aris, in some ways I agree with you, though conditionally.

It is my understanding that the next best step is to find a solution to our computational power problem, hence all the talk about inventing friendly AI and keeping it in check for our uses.

As far as abstraction is concerned, I don't really know what sense you're using the term. when I see that word, the first thing that comes to mind where that can be problematic is the case of failing to boil down points of disagreement down to the 5 second level. Does this help?

Perhaps you've seen a lot of people not taking this advise, or maybe you've seen various examples of the ample amounts of disguised sealioning in the discussion sections. Or maybe the culture here merely requires some practice.

Nevertheless, you get used to it. I doubt what you've seen is representative of rationality as a whole. I base this solely on your claim of being new. And unfortunately we don't have a fantastic, more powerful form of computation at our disposal to do what we want yet. So we work with what we've got.

You might be right that we tend to focus on details too much, but I don't think your example shows this.

when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics, and one subthread went off to discuss the appropriateness of the term "gender equality".

All this shows is that we're bad at solving the problem you asked us to solve. But it's not like you're paying us to solve it. We can choose to talk about whatever we find most interesting. That doesn't mean we couldn't solve the problem if we wanted to.