LESSWRONG
LW

Inside/Outside ViewRationality
Frontpage

7

External rationality vs. internal rationality

by metachirality
2nd Aug 2023
1 min read
0

7

Inside/Outside ViewRationality
Frontpage

7

New Comment
Moderation Log
More from metachirality
View more
Curated and popular this week
0Comments

Internal rationality is using truth-preserving thought processes that output good hypotheses given good data. Examples include:

  • Identifying inconsistencies in hypotheses.
  • Having detailed models/inside views.
  • Not doing motivated reasoning.
  • Evaluating one's thought processes.

External rationality is discerning good data from bad data. Examples include:

  • Identifying the selection effects and incentives behind what data one sees.
  • Identifying whether some data is "adversarial": data that strongly suggests a hypothesis just because there will inevitably be one source of data that strongly suggests a given hypothesis just because there are so many sources of data.
  • Knowing when to use an outside view.
  • Knowing what experts to trust on a topic one knows nothing about.

External rationality and internal rationality intersect and build upon one another.

I like using these words instead of "inside view" and "outside view" because "outside view" tends to exclude model-based reasoning when you can have detailed models of what data is good or bad. Also "outside view" specifically refers to reference class forecasting and I don't want to overload the term. I also feel like "external rationality" and "internal rationality" are better at communicating the fuzzy intuition I'm getting at here.