Recent comments

@Nick - I’m sure that book would be a good read. Mind wandering is definitely an important component. Related to this topic is also fantasy-proneness and lateral thinking, all being various expressions of ‘openness’.

Also, the ability to shift perspectives is closely linked to the ability to take on other people’s perspectives. That involves cognitive empathy, mind-reading, and theory of mind. This goes hand in hand with inclusivity and a larger circle of moral concern, even to the point of an out-group bias.

As the opposite side of the equation, I was thinking that the direct personality correlate of functional fixation would be what is called cognitive closure or need for closure’ along with need for certainty and low tolerance for ambiguity. It’s a tendency toward control and constraint.

David, I suspected the omission was a conscious choice, but I wanted to give you a heads up just in case.

Benjamin, Thanks for the additional pointers to literature. I’m always interested in research into the supposedly mysterious processes at play in meta-rationality such as creativity, intuition, imagination, improvisation, etc. I just started reading some papers in a fascinating book, “Creativity and the Wandering Mind: Spontaneous and Controlled Cognition - A volume in Explorations in Creativity Research” https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128164006/creativity-and-the-wandering-mind :
‘The purpose of this book is to provide readers with a state-of-the-art collection of papers about the impact that mind wandering and cognitive control have on several manifestations of creativity, including imagination, fantasy, and play.’

Just another example of the myriad aspects affecting creativity et al!

@Nick Gall - I have no grand thoughts to add. But functional fixation sounds like the opposite of what social scientists call cognitive flexibility. The latter is a key component of fluid intelligence, the main factor of increasing average IQ over recent generations (i.e., Flynn effect).

Other correlated facets are cognitive complexity, pattern recognition, perspective shifting, aesthetic appreciation, abstract thought, negative capability, etc. Also, as relevant to your inquiry, cognitive flexibility and fluid intelligence are strongly linked to creativity and divergetnt thinking, of course along with perspective shifting.

You might look into the extensive social science research that touches upon personality theory and has direct relationship to ideological differences. Anyway, I’m willing to bet that all of this overlaps with meta-rationality, as part of general neurocognitive development.

Hi David,

I’m writing up my thoughts on creative improvisation, which I believe is founded on the ability to recontextualize, reframe, repurpose, and I was wondering if you discussed the concept of “functional fixation” in your writings on meta-rationality, since you discuss fixation in Meaningness.

One obstacle to the ability to reframe is a behavior known as “functional fixation” or “functional fixedness”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness . A paradigm of this cognitive bias is demonstrated by the “candle problem”: “give participants a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches, and ask them to attach the candle to the wall so that it does not drip onto the table below”. There is an extensive psychological literature on the phenomenon and factors (including exercises) that can reduce it, ie increase one’s ability to appreciate the nebulosity of a situation. Some reference to it might be a useful addition to meta-rationality.

David- Although I’m puzzled at the intensity of your reaction to Galef’s rather anodyne remarks, your suggestion about how to introduce Bayes style calculations reminded me that I’d written something along just those lines a few years ago as auxiliary material for my wife’s stats class. Perhaps you’d like to have a look and make comments? Everybody else is welcome also to comment, swipe parts, etc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_kac92mzjjTwIx_fzyqYyiN8D4Yiniff/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106543307891005183746&rtpof=true&sd=true

Very interesting! Thank you for your insights. A few thoughts that occurred to me:

1. In the education system, seems like PhD is the first time where there are no more guardrails or training wheels, hence having to confront reality, where systems fail. Perhaps we need to start having people confront reality earlier?
2. Related to the above, even without mastering rationality/systems, many people confront the reality that their tools fail. How one orients to that seems to fall under the domain of metacognition. I wonder how much of your work will be about doing metacognition in general, to better support the sub-specialty of metarationality.
3. I imagine that for many people, rational systems kind of just fall out of the sky/are thrust upon them, without much explanation. If the system works, great. If not, people are lost. What if those rational systems were better motivated in education via metacognitive reasoning?
4. Where I’m landing is that it seems like the missing piece for many people is taking metacognition seriously, and metacognition seems like it may be a pre-rational activity in the sense that it is a muscle that can be built without rationality as a prerequisite. It’s also very much an ongoing process. That first metacognitive insight might be that one has to leverage the power of systems and formal methods. But then one might fall into the complacency trap of pursuing the One real system. However, if one was primed to metacognitive thinking previously, then hopefully one would be more predisposed to the next move to metarationality.

Great fan of your work!

I was curious, what maturity of systems/formal thinking do you think is needed for one to practice metarationality?

If one needs PhD level training, then it seems that metarationality will only be accessible to the few.

However, it seems to me that people casually deal with systems and ontologies in the form of categories every day, and I wonder if there is a gentler path to metarationality that is less hard core? Does the casual categorization that people use every day even count as rational-thought-work in your book? Or would it fall under reflexive reasonableness?

The TL;DR: I wonder how much metarational work can be done without a lot of rational training first, or simply by engaging with baby-rational or baby-formal work. Or is rational work really a prerequisite and catalyst for getting better at metarationality?

Thanks!

I can’t find an older exact match for the parable, but discussing the origins of mathematics in terms of pebbles goes back at least as far as John Stuart Mill’s 1843 “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive” (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27942/pg27942-images.html#toc37), and people have been criticising it since at least Frege’s 1884 book “The Foundations of Arithmetic” (which makes fun of Mill’s “gingerbread and pebble” arithmetic, before discussing some cases in which natural number arithmetic initially seems to apply but gives wrong conclusions).

You wrote: “But science doesn’t work, most of the time, even. The replication crisis consists of the realization that, in many sciences, most of what had been believed, based on statistical analyses, was actually false.”

That may be true, but if a replication experiment does not reach “p < 0.05” it does not imply that the original claim was false. After all, the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence!

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Donald Berwick

Thank you for the insights, especially the commitment to belief as practiced in the wild. I think it is highly under-rated (especially amongst people committed to rationalism) how useful “truth-orthogonal” practices are. (Where here “truth” is in the narrow, rationalist sense, and not in the broader sense that you use it, including things like hagiographic/“mythic” truths).

One thing I wanted to get your thoughts on: I agree that, from a stage 4+ perspective that a lot of modes of believing are not interested in truth. However, it seems to me that in stage 3, people can’t tell that is the case. I.e. to the conspiracy theorist, they are one and the same. Everything looks like capital-T Truth. And so you have people drinking bleach, because they take their beliefs really seriously (well, seriously enough to act on them, though perhaps not enough to commit to them if they stop serving their core function of organizational/social/mythic concerns). I.e ethnographically, I am not so sure that fact/belief distinction is clear from a stage 3 perspective. The things they believe feel like fact to them… They even have a word for this: “alternative facts.”

Being able to see the difference seems to be very hard to communicate — perhaps that is what the typical STEM 3->4 education does, and it is much to my chagrin to see so many people working against seeing this transition. The worst part of it is that in a sense highly practical, because most people negotiate the world using reasonableness.

My hope is that stage 5 thinking can find more productive ways to engage with stage 3, though I have my reservations as well.

The link to the Meaning and Meta-Rationality episode is to a different Internet domain, which no longer exists.

The United States spends almost double, per capita, what any and every other nation spends on health care. This extra spend totals at least 2 trillion dollars a year. The maze put up by insurance companies is the tip of the dagger in Americans’ backs. The “waste” you describe in the form of additional hospital billing - that’s all good from an insurance company’s point of view because they just end up passing this through to their customers while getting a percentage off the top. It is literally the equivalent of a hedge funds “investments” on which the managers get 2% of net and 20% of “profit” each year.
We need a public system of medical care in the US. Not a public option for insurance - that’s like saying we can tame Godzilla; while Medicare for all is better than nothing, the actual solution as seen in the rest of the world is health care as a public utility.
As for health care being a political football - I disagree completely. Health care reform is the true third rail of American politics.

I am 73 years. I have no medical condition or diagnoses. I take no prescription medication. I have long stopped needing the Quackerie. I don’t give them a penny and know better than to consider their advice. There are no magic beans. Real science says you will live longer and happier by staying away from garbage medicine.

I spent 30 years as a medical science director. A more corrupt, lying, greedy, racketeering bunch doesn’t exist.

My mother is 94 and doing pretty well. She fired the doctors who were junking her up on stupid drugs and got better.

The whole situation is very simple. The United States has a private for-profit health care system where private insurers are expected to foot the bill for a bloated and overly expensive industry. Private insurers like receiving your monthly premiums from you and your employer but don’t like paying health providers for services as it cuts into their “profits”. Insurers can’t tell people to “F’*% off, we ain’t paying” which is what they want to do, but they can insist on only communicating by Fax or burying you in paperwork and Kafka-esque bureaucratic tail-chasing while claiming it all serves some greater unknowable purpose related to their well-meaning, but unfortunate institutional ineptitude. This is utter bullshit. It is an overly elaborate ruse. The system appears mind-numbingly complicated because insurers don’t want to pay. The American private insurance health care system is a “market failure”. Insurers have a perverse incentive not to serve their purpose (paying claims/providers) unlike FedEx or Amazon. They fight with paperwork and obfuscation, along with “mistakes”, “oversights” and “delays” that are deliberate policy. Delayed payments are payments denied if the patient dies in the interim. Providers fight back with more paperwork and policy. You get stuck in the middle - paralyzed, sick, stressed, in debt, but paying premiums and fearing bad credit scores, debt collectors and bankruptcy.

My mum suffers dementia. Luckily in Australia she is receiving free health care and is based now in a fantastic dementia ward (with 13 others) in an aged care centre in her home town (2100 population). Dad lives in their home in the same town. He cracked some ribs last year in a fall and had to be taken by ambulence to the nearest big hosptial (60km away). Luckily that was all free. He was there for almost 3 weeks.
As the eldest son I had to organise Mum’s aged care, and it was made very easy. The government organisations seemed to ask the right questions.
Very professional staff. We appreciate how lucky we are. Mum and Dad don’t have much money, they ran a small business farming, and a taxi service for 60 years. Good to know that the government is supporting them so well.
We hear many stories about health care in the US , frightening stuff.

So, if “true” as a concept scores only 2.2, what’s the meta-rational “workhorse” replacement? Something like “adequate”?

First–what a nightmarish situation you describe. I’m sure seeing your mother’s decline into more severe dementia is heartbreaking, and to spend this time battling colossally frustrating dead ends is the last thing you (or anyone) needs.
Second–the for-profit insurance model is inherently bad–especially medical insurance. Customers pre-pay for a service (paying their medical bills) that, if delivered, eats into the insurer’s profits. So their incentive is to dawdle, confuse, stonewall, etc.–and if they do that long enough, the patient may get better–or die–and they are off the hook. And not only do the customer’s pre-pay, they are required to buy the insurer’s product, and often have little choice which insurer to go with–and changing insurers is made absurdly difficult.
Third – I wonder if the move to concierge medicine by the wealthy is exacerbating these problems, as those with power and influence to enact big changes have removed themselves from this syster and thus, for the most part, from caring to fix it. (analoguous to private jets and the joys of economy commercial)

The way you described “the transition from cell to non-cell” makes me think of the Ship of Theseus. I’ve always considered the Ship of Theseus to be the the birth of postmodernism, and one of the most important thought experiments in all of ancient philosophy. (Despite its reputation as cute dinner party banter.)

If we accept that the idea of propositions is incoherent—that there is nothing that could be believed or true in the rationalist sense—then we have to abandon the rationalist models for belief and truth.

Is a model of belief and truth just a set of propositions? If so, what sense does it make to talk about abandoning them if the idea of propositions is taken as incoherent?

what if we just decided that every astrological body, including planets or things-that-might-be-planets or I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-A-Planet… got an IAU number? like there are currently only 8 things that don’t have one, unless I’m misunderstanding, and they already gave Pluto a hilariously large one given how long we’ve known about it.

…and then the IAU wouldn’t have to sweat about what gets a number, because everything gets a number, and they could rest because THEY can do their job without THEM needing to be the ones who are responsible for coming up with a reasonable definition of “planet”.

and folk classifications could continue to treat Pluto as a planet for cultural reasons or whatever (I still call Venus “the evening star” sometimes even though that name is listed on wikipedia’s page “List of former planets”)

(more precisely, it seems like comets still wouldn’t get numbers?)

David, thinking about Brent’s comments from 2001, which you responded to by talking about the need for apprenticeship. Are you familiar with the system of Permaculture Design Certificate training?

David Holmgren and co designed this as a way to introduce people to the basics of the design system, in a short course (or a series of shorter ones). In a way that gives students a solid conceptual basis for lifetime learning about the application of the design principles, choice of material techniques to implement designs, and so on. Anyone who has completed a PDC is considered capable of teaching one.

First, I wondered if this could be a model for introducing people to meta-systemic thinking and practice. Then, I wondered if it might already be an example of doing exactly that? The approach that many of the “systems thinkers” often referenced by permies, eg Donella Meadows, author of Dancing With Systems, seem to me more akin to stage 5 than stage 4.

Hi David, I’ve found your writing on meta-rationality very illuminating, and have written an exposition of my understanding of meta-rationality and how it addresses a range of open problems in epistemology. I couldn’t track down your email address but I’d love to get your feedback on it - drop me a message if so!

You can find me at @richardmcngo on twitter, or via my homepage (richardcngo.com).

The only hit on google for “self-consciousness recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation” is this blog.

Same for subsections of the quote, such as “self-consciousness recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity” and even “self-consciousness recognizes pure”

Is this an actual Hegel quote?

This blog post is really quite excellent and I also enjoyed all of the comments. I just wanted to add something that I found in a book which may be of interest.

“Probability Logics”, Ognjanovic, Raskovic and Markovic, Springer 2016, ISBN: 978-3-319-47011-5

On page 49, there is some discussion of John Maynard Keynes, and then “Thus probability extends classical logic” (ostensibly according to Keynes).

So I thought that this was an interesting thing to find in a book. Please bear in mind that I personally am in agreement with your overall thesis here, but the reference to Keynes is interesting and I just wanted to share that. Of course, Keynes interpretation of probability is pretty bizarre, so it might come as no surprise that he would take that view.

I bet early OpenAI was like this. Algorithms at SFIX when I joined (2015) was somewhat like this. Maybe you could think of YCombinator as being like this? In some ways the old Netflix culture doc implied something like this (maximal freedom from structure, if you do a bad job you are fired)

The biggest problem is there ends up being a superposition between L3 and L5. L3 stuff happens and drags the whole thing down. How can you staff your org only with L5 people? Natural tendency is to apply L4 systems to prevent the L3 stuff.

“Companies run on cargo cult business management; states run on cargo cult policies; schools run on cargo cult education theories (Feynman mentioned this one); mainstream modern medicine is mostly witch doctoring.”

Could you please provide some evidence of this? And something to show it’s a significant percentage?