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Pitfalls of Rationality

Edited by habryka, Ruby, et al. last updated 13th Nov 2021

Pitfalls of Rationality are frequent error modes, obstacles or problems that arise when people try to practice rationality, or engage with rationality-related materials. Related concepts include the "valley of bad rationality".

There are two threads touched in posts under this tag:

  1. Things that go wrong when people try to be more rational and they unintentionally end up making things worse.
  2. Arguably, why haven't rationalists visible succeeded at their bold and ambitious goals yet?

Regarding the first point, from Incremental Progress and the Valley:

Ah.  Well, here's the the thing:  An incremental step in the direction of rationality, if the result is still irrational in other ways, does not have to yield incrementally more winning.

The optimality theorems that we have for probability theory and decision theory, are for perfect probability theory and decision theory.  There is no companion theorem which says that, starting from some flawed initial form, every incremental modification of the algorithm that takes the structure closer to the ideal, must yield an incremental improvement in performance.  This has not yet been proven, because it is not, in fact, true.

See also: Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement, Value of Rationality

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Posts tagged Pitfalls of Rationality
234Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
82
270Reality-Revealing and Reality-Masking Puzzles
AnnaSalamon
6y
57
121Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy
AnnaSalamon
15y
95
533Reason as memetic immune disorder
PhilGoetz
16y
184
157Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
patrissimo
15y
261
252Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great
Scott Alexander
16y
281
232Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence
abramdemski
6y
29
69"Epiphany addiction"
cousin_it
13y
90
66My experience with the "rationalist uncanny valley"
Thomas Kwa
5y
18
209The Treacherous Path to Rationality
Jacob Falkovich
5y
116
53Summary of "The Straw Vulcan"
alexvermeer
14y
27
107Bayesians vs. Barbarians
Eliezer Yudkowsky
16y
277
99Incremental Progress and the Valley
Eliezer Yudkowsky
16y
114
88I'm scared.
Mass_Driver
15y
87
86Adding Up To Normality
orthonormal
5y
22
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