Opinions on postrationalism
A while ago, somebody asked me on this blog if I was a postrationalist. At the time I wasn’t really familiar enough with what this meant to be able to answer. However, I’m now fairly sure that I am not a postrationalist.
First of all, if all the label refers to is “fucking around incomprehensibly”, then it’s content-free and there’s no point identifying with it.
Some people have tried to give more concrete descriptions, e.g. Darcey Riley and Ashley Yakeley (@polyaletheia). I’ll go through some of these attributes of postrationalists that have been described, and explain how I don’t share them.
System 1 and System 2
Darcey talks about a difference between rationalists and postrationalists in their attitudes towards Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 (basically, intuition and analytical reasoning). According to her, rationalists see System 1 as a straightforwardly worse system than System 2 in terms of accuracy, which exists only because by trading off accuracy, it manages to be able to work more quickly than System 2. Important decisions where accuracy is more important than speed should always be made using System 2. Postrationalists, on the other hand, believe that System 1 can be just as accurate or more so under certain circumstances; the picture of the advantages and disadvantages is more complicated than just “System 1 fast but inaccurate, System 2 accurate but slow”.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion in this. It does seem plausible that System 1 could be more accurate with regards to things that humans have always had to deal with as a species, that our instincts have evolved to deal with. But that is a limited set of things, and getting more limited over time as modernity advances. Much of the things people have to deal with today are novel on an evolutionary timescale, and I don’t see any reason to expect System 1 to be effective with dealing with these things.
Moreover, I think the vast majority of people do already largely rely on System 1, especially with regard to the sort of instinct-driven things that it would be expected to be good for. It’s only a very small, peculiar set of people that need to hear the pro-System 1 side of the bravery debate; most people are much more in need of some System 2 evangelization. It’s also plausible that people vary in how effective their System 1 thinking is. In particular, I think autistic people, who make up a large part of the people who read about rationalism and postrationalism on the Internet, are likely to have poor intuitionistic thinking capabilities, and need to rely on System 2 more than ordinary people.
It’s worth noting that System 1, in addition to being fast, is also low effort in comparison to System 2, so there is a great temptation to use it even in circumstances where one has the time to do a proper System 2 analysis. There could be an element of wishful thinking in the postrationalist advocacy for System 1.
Darcey does mention that postrationalists are interested in ways to make System 1 more effective, such as “magick, ritual and meditation”. This is something I haven’t heard a lot about--if any postrationalists have made any progress in this area, I’d be interested to hear. I am aware of people who have claimed to have become “enlightened” through extensive meditation, but these people consistently fail to convincingly show that they have actually learned anything of significance.
Scientific realism
Darcey says that postrationalists are “more likely to reject scientific realism”. I’m not familiar with this term, so I did a skim-read of the SEP article.
Although I can’t be confident that I’ve understood the article properly, it does look like I reject scientific realism, and thus agree with the postrationalists
Scientific realism is described as construing claims about both observable and unobservable things as having truth values, while "instrumentalists” deny that claims about unobservable things are meaningful. I think that my definition of “meaningful” inherently involves the idea that unobservable things are not meaningful; if I believed that claims about unobservable things were meaningful, I would have to be using a different definition of “meaningful”. Therefore I do seem to agree with the “instrumentalists”, unless they use a different definition of “meaningful”.
Likewise, realism is said to be committed to “the idea that theoretical claims (interpreted literally as describing a mind-independent reality) constitute knowledge of the world”. Now if somebody asked me whether I believe that theoretical claims constitute knowledge of the world, I’d definitely say yes; however, I don’t think I interpret these claims literally as describing a mind-independent reality in the way the SEP author is getting at. I think that claims can only be made as part of models of the world, and reality is what is reflected in the situation that some models make better predictions---as verified by empiricial observations, coming from the mind, and with regards to particular purposes, also coming from the mind---than others. There is no single “ultimately true” model (after all, such “ultimate truth” is unobservable---we will never know whether we have the perfect model, because there is always the chance that new evidence will falsify the current one), but the concept of reality is meaningful, otherwise there would be nothing to guide the choice of models. So I think it is possible to conceive of more strongly anti-realist positions than mine (such as one where one simply chooses arbitrary models) but my position is still on the anti-realist side.
Exploring new worldviews and conceptual frameworks
Postrationalists tend to enjoy this, according to Darcey. Well, I enjoy it too, but I think most ordinary rationalists enjoy it just as much?
Attitudes to forces of nature
This is one of the biggest disagreements I have---I definitely do think death and suffering, and the forces of nature insofar as they cause death and suffering, are cosmic evils that must be destroyed.
I think this stems from my acceptance of the existence of forces of nature other than those that cause death and suffering. In particular, it seems to me that part of the nature of being human is that one should regard death and suffering as evils, and work to prevent them from happening. I think this is a more permanent and indestructible part of the experience of being human than the experience of death and suffering, which can be (and has been) made less of an inevitability.
Some degree of acceptance that death and suffering will happen is necessary---it’s counterproductive if your efforts to avoid these things cause you more suffering than if you simply lived without concern---but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to destroy these things as far as possible.
Spirituality, rituals and magick
Postrationalists are interested in these things, according to Darcey. Well, I wouldn’t say I’m totally uninterested, but I am pretty unfamiliar with these things, and I don’t know much about what somebody would get out of them.
Qualitative over quantitative improvements
Postrationalists apparently are especially interested in helping people with things like existential angst, as well as more quantifiable things like money or food. I’m not sure if there is actually that much of a difference between rationalists and postrationalists in this regard.
Obviously, helping people deal with things like existential angst is also an important part of improving the state of the world. But the more quantifiable measures are a lot easier to help people with. If people were to avoid providing help with regards to quantitative measures that they were in a position to help with because they regarded this as somehow against their ideology, that would be a great shame.
Surrealism
I think I like surrealist art and fiction, but I wouldn’t say I’m like, massively into it. This probably isn’t one of the most important distinguishing factors of postrationalists.
Ashley Yakeley’s perspectivism
In Ashley Yakeley’s blogpost, he describes an attitude to truth he calls “perspectivism”. It looks like this is the same as or at least similar to my position that reality is a measure of goodness of fit on models together with purposes, so I basically agree with this. (Although I’m pretty skeptical that believing the Sun is a god is useful.)
Ashley considers this the core of his postrationalty, so I guess I could be regarded as a postrationalist as a result, if this one point of agreement is enough to outweight my disagreements on other points. Nevertheless, I’m still going to avoid identifying with the postrationalist label.
Lack of actionability
There is one other thing about postrationality that concerns me, which is the tangible results or advice that one can act on. Postrationalist writers have a tendency to not explain things fully, or to advocate for something as helpful, like intuitionistic reasoning, or David Chapman’s “meta-rationality”, without ever properly explaining why or how. It could be argued that this is part of the nature of what postrationalists are interested in---intuitionistic, illegible things that aren’t amenable to analytical reasoning. But even if these things do pay off, the fact that postrationalists can’t convincingly convey that they do makes them unattractive as a movement to take any interest in. What’s the point, if you aren’t going to learn anything?
Ultimately, I feel like the ordinary rationalists are a lot more likely than the postrationalists to produce insights that can actually help people think.
