Rationalists are people who have an irrational preference for rationality.

This may sound silly, but when you think about it, it couldn't be any other way. I am not saying that all reasons in favor of rationality are irrational -- in fact, there are many rational reasons to be rational! It's just that "rational reasons to be rational" is a circular argument that is not going to impress anyone who doesn't already care about rationality for some other reason.

So when there is a debate like "but wouldn't the right kind of self-deception be more instrumentally useful than perfectly calibrated rationality? do you care more about rationality or about winning?", well... you can make good arguments for both sides...

On one hand, yes, if your goal is to maximize your utility function U then "maximizing U by any means necessary" is by definition ≥ "maximizing U using rationality". On the other hand, if you take a step back, how would you know whether your approach X actually maximizes U, if you gave up on rationality? The self-deception that you chose instrumentally as a part of strategy X could as a side effect bias your estimates about how much U you really get by following X... but there may be ways to deflect this counter-argument.

1) Doublethink. Keep simultaneously two models of reality, one of them rational, the other optimized by the former to be winning. There are some shaky assumptions here. It may be computationally impossible for a human to keep two separate models of reality; to make sure that it's the former that nudges the latter (rather than the other way round, or both nudging each other), but it's the latter (rather than a mix of both) that influences System 1. But this sounds like a nirvana fallacy: the people who choose rationality over doublethink are not doing rationality perfectly either! So let's compare the average human doublethink against the average human rationality (instead of a hypothetical perfect rationality). Now it is not so clear that the rationality wins.

2) Multiple agents. Imagine a father who wants his son to be winning as much as possible. The father could be a perfect rationalist, while raising his son to believe the optimal mix of rationality and self-serving bullshit. Here the objections against self-deception do not apply; the father is not deceiving himself about anything. (We could make a different objection, that the son will...

bushsoul

bushsoul