The Craft and the Codex

The rationalist community started with the idea of rationality as a martial art – a set of skills you could train in and get better at. Later the metaphor switched to a craft. Art or craft, parts of it did get developed: I remain very impressed with Eliezer’s work on how to change your mind and everything presaging Tetlock on prediction.

But there’s a widespread feeling in the rationalist community these days that this is the area where we’ve made the least progress. AI alignment has grown into a developing scientific field. Effective altruism is big, professionalized, and cash-rich. It’s just the art of rationality itself that remains (outside the usual cognitive scientists who have nothing to do with us and are working on a slightly different project) a couple of people writing blog posts.

Part of this is that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I think another part was a shift in emphasis.

Martial arts does involve theory – for example, beginning fencers have to learn the classical parries – but it’s a little bit of theory and a lot of practice. Most of becoming a good fencer involves either practicing the same lunge a thousand times in ideal conditions until you could do it in your sleep, or fighting people on the strip.

I’ve been thinking about what role this blog plays in the rationalist project. One possible answer is “none” – I’m not enough of a mathematician to talk much about the decision theory and machine learning work that’s really important, and I rarely touch upon the nuts and bolts of the epistemic rationality craft. I freely admit that (like many people) I tend to get distracted by the latest Outrageous Controversy, and so spend way too much time discussing things like Piketty’s theory of inequality which get more attention from the chattering classes but are maybe less important to the very-long-run future of the world.