Epistemic status: 100%
Rationalists want to be people who care about the truth: they write down epistemic statuses and walk through the muddy statistical waters. They like to write down their mistakes and talk about times they changed their mind. They try to decouple facts and values — which is impossible.
These are methods that are easy to see, easy to be. It’s easy to write down ‘epistemic status: unlikely’. It’s not even that difficult to read scientific studies or books.
The problem is that excellent thought is not something that can be easily seen, sometimes not even by another excellent thinker.
Consider the question: ‘how heritable is athletic ability?’
An awful answer: 0%
An ok answer: aren’t there some identical twins in the NBA?
A good answer: 50-80%, depending on the measure.
A great answer: 50-80%, but partly because motivation, diet, and training style are also genetically influenced.
An excellent answer: ask a different question — is it possible for you to go from a poor to great physique, given your individual circumstances?
The kind of qualities rationalists value — precision, demonstrated effort, self-consciousness — encourage people to give good answers.
They do not encourage excellent, or even great answers to questions. Looking back at the example, what makes the great answer great is that it answers an implict question: ‘if athletic ability is overwhelmingly genetic, then why even try?’. The answer: wanting to try, and trying well for that matter, are also influenced by genes.
Great thinking is not legible; only answers are.
III.
“Does exercise make people more intelligent?”
“Does exercise treat depression?”
“Does exercise…”
I’ve realised that none of these questions matter to me. The amount of exercise I would do in my daily life would not change if I was certain of any of their answers. I do resistance training for aesthetics, strength, and pain management. It turns out that weightlifting is pretty good at giving you those things, and that is all I care for. With time, I have come to derive an intrinsic enjoyment of weightlifting, something I have not always possessed.
For some people, whether exercise treats depression really is an important question. It defines whether weightlifting is worth it, or not.
Taste in questions isn’t even legible to people with good taste in questions.
X.
Often, I find that great answers are not defined by their logic. What convinced me of hedonism’s truth was a redefinition of what pleasure even is: it’s not “dopamine” or eating deep fried weed. Pleasure and pain are the valence by which we evaluate our feelings. People can find a counterintuitive pleasure in refusing to drink alcohol — which I partake in; or they can enjoy being consumed by hate and rage.
No philosopher has crowned Bronze Age Pervert with the honor of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of hedonism. Not like any of them would dare to in the first place.
A lot of good thinking I admire in others is automatic and the result of years of conscientious practice. An example: some guy posts a study saying “lower PISA scores mean IQ is declining”. Then, one of our guys drops in and says “not when you account for measurement invariance and demographic trends”.
That’s not a rebuttal that can be genetically encoded. Any >160 IQ person could have come to the wrong answer, and any >100 IQ person could understand the reasoning behind the true — correct — answer. What makes people able to understand and grasp the truth is not a pure function of rationality.
I am not making the case for domain expertise or tacit knowledge. In many cases, I have seen the boys dunk on supposed experts for not remembering what publication bias is, or not knowing how to interpret p-values.
II.
Sometimes, a question can be poorly asked or just useless. Many perennial philosophical debates are like this. Other times, philosophical debates recur because the answers are not comfortable. “Is solipsism true” — yes. “Is there free will” — no. “Is there a meaning to life” — a nonsensical question.
I used to have trouble accepting that people are selfish and that incentives run the world. Even as little as a year ago.
One day I eventually accepted it was true despite the discomfort. Only recently, did I realise why I didn’t like the idea. It’s that I have a set way of interacting with people: I’m polite by default. I don’t like arguing or defecting. Those aren’t saintly qualities; they are preferences. The fact that my preferences are not morally justified does not mean I cannot have them.
This is the snowclone. A person does not want to believe X is true. That is because they believe that if X is true, then Y must be too; or at least, they consider it a possibility. And it is Y that they have an issue with. And maybe there is nothing wrong with Y; there is something wrong with them. Y — a simple letter — threatens their identity.
I.
There is a temptation here that must be overriden. That is the tendency to dissolve and dive into depths, when there is no reason to. Sometimes, the surface is all there is.
V.
A smart man wants his answers to be accurate.
A strong man wants them to be true.
A genius wants them to matter.
i liked this a lot and have to say quibble with one point, which is that doing rationalism as opposed to practicing rationalism is exactly the sort of intuitive thinking on your feet behavior activated by years of practice that the sequences talks about
Mu