This is a linkpost for https://sundaystopwatch.eu/rationality-skills/
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The correct amount of time and effort to devote to the meta-level is not 100% (you don't do anything useful), and not 0% (you don't know how to do anything well). Somewhere in the middle is the optimal amount, and that amount will differ between people for all sorts of reasons. What do you think the optimal amount is for you, and why? That would essentially remove the problem this piece talks about from the piece itself, by tying the thinking back to a real world problem you're trying to solve.
2My optimal amount is likely 80 real, 20 meta. This is mostly because I've found that intellectual masturbation is easy, and trying to figure out the truth on an object-level issue is difficult (you actually need to do research), and so I default to the first one.
Incidentally, I think this is why "insight porn" authors are often prolific. It's easy to generate "insight" -- or at least, comparatively easier.
Not being useful is often not an important problem, for meanings of "useful" that are not tautologically referring back to the stated purpose of the activity itself (like you can do with chess). Usefulness is an occasional side effect and a meaningful indicator for many activities, but targeting it directly can be disruptive. Short feedback loops are great where they can be found, which isn't everywhere.
When the purpose of an activity isn't clear, "usefulness" in the tautological sense doesn't really work, and playing more is a central thing that helps with finding out more about what this purpose should naturally be. Being too early in stating purposes too clearly results in goodharting to some arbitrary indicator. And "usefulness" in some other non-tautological sense will generally just ask you to go do something else (which won't be about playing chess).
If you have a developed system for finding the difference between truth and falsehood, and constantly think about rationality skills, and are always improving them, learning new techniques, and keep thinking about meta-level things: congratulations, your skills are useless.
Well, they’re not entirely useless. There’s a theoretical world in which, were you to apply them, they would suddenly become useful.
There’s the notion that by doing meta-level work, you’re sort of recursively improving your ability to reason; by not pursuing to know the truth for an object-level problem, but instead by pursuing to know how to know truth, you’re making yourself more truth-seekingly powerful, you’re turning yourself into a Bene Gesserit, you’re becoming an instrument of divine truth-finding, a being capable of discerning truth among a thousand lies… Only that never happens.
You keep writing stupid little essays like this that are about the meta-level, about “being a rationalist”, and what a rationalist should do, instead of writing essays about things that have happened, or are happening, or will happen. (Or should happen.)
Does practicing chess make you smarter? Which books should you read if you want to become a successful warlord? What do telomeres actually do? What are the variables that determine if an immigration program is successful? What’s the moral case for eating shellfish? How likely is it that random ARM instructions cause a NOP sled? How to decentralize overcrowded cities and create smaller regional urban centers? Etc, etc, etc.
Yes, this whole essay in fact suffers from the very problem I’m trying to convey; that it’s close to useless to meta meta meta everything if you never do the actual thing. This is a letter to myself: learn the thing, do the thing, write about thing.