This is a special post for quick takes by David Udell. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Rationalism is about the real world. It may or may not strike you as an especially internally consistent, philosophically interesting worldview -- this is not what rationality is about. Rationality is about seeing things happen in the real world and then updating your understanding of the world when those things you see surprise you so that they wouldn't surprise you again.
Why care about predicting things in the world well?
Almost no matter what you ultimately care about, being able to predict ahead of time what's going to happen next will make you better at planning for your goal.
One central rationalist insight is that thoughts are for guiding actions. Think of your thinking as the connecting tissue sandwiched between the sense data that enters your sense organs and the behaviors your body returns. Your brain is a function from a long sequence of observations (all the sensory inputs you've ever received, in the order you received them) to your next motor output.
Understood this way, the point of having a brain and having thoughts is to guide your actions. If your thoughts aren't all ultimately helping you better steer the universe (... (read more)
If you can imagine a potential worry, then you can generate that worry. Rationalism is, in part, the skill of never being predictably surprised by things you already foresaw.
It may be that you need to "wear another hat" in order to pull that worry out of your brain, or to model another person advising you to get your thoughts to flow that way, but whatever your process, anything you can generate for yourself is something you can foresee and consider. This aspect of rationalism is the art of "mining out your future cognition," to exactly the extent that you can foresee it, leaving whatever's left over a mystery to be updated on new observations.
[...]
1David Udell
Minor spoilers for mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (planecrash Book 1).
The citation link in this post takes you to a NSFW subthread in the story.
[...]