What is rationality

According to Yudkiwsky rationality is manifested in twelve virtues:

• Relinquishment.
  • Destroy false beliefs. Everything that could be destroyed by the truth should be. Don't attach yourself to beliefs.
• Lightness.
  • Allow evidence to move you around at the whims of the new facts and information. Surrender to the truth.
• Evenness.
  • Don't have too much faith in evidence. Don't believe from the first glance to a presented fact. Don't select between facts, analyze all givens. Don't seek the truth in the arguments or hypothesis, you are not for or against something. Your task is to see, listen count and come to terms with, first with yourself then with facts. In this account, you are a judge. FIND FROM KAHNEMANNS ON BELIEFS
• Argument.
  • Prevent your friends from helping you. And don't deny helping yourself by saying "I won't argue", you effectively remove yourself from help. And don't believe that you do a favour by accepting the arguments of your friends. Fairness on all sides isn't balancing but compromise. Truth isn't handed out in equal portions before a debate or discussion. It is somewhere there in between arguments. Seek it.
• Empiricism.
  • Roots of knowledge is observation and fruit is prediction. Belief is less important than experience. Stick to measurable facts and data. Do not let argument wander like a leaf on the wind and allow it to become something else. Do not be blinded by words, subtract the words keep figures. What does you is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball Jerry Cleaver [[Базовые знания]]
• Simplicity.
  • Strive to simplify your beliefs, design, planning, and justification. The more details, the bigger chance that a belief is false. A chain always has more than one link, the complex issue also has more than one step on the path to the goal. But beware of making too many steps or links. Because in order to reach the goal you need every step to be correct and every chain link strong. If they are not you may arrive somewhere you haven't planned on arriving to.
• Humility.
  • Await your own wrongness, accept it humbly, gather insights and start a new iteration. It manifests in a way we prepare ourselves for the most devastating effects or errors of beliefs. It is impossible to achieve perfection, no one is capable of this kind of feat.
• Perfectionism.
  • Impossibility of perfection couldn't be an excuse for not trying to reach it. The more you do, the more you notice. As your mind becomes silent, you start hear more noise. Ontological rattle [[онтологический дребезг]]. Cultivate zero tolerance to errors. Correcting them makes an expert. And if no mistakes are left, it is no excuse for not looking. Perfection is unreachable, but nonetheless you must try. Do not be content with a good enough answer, seek a perfect one.
• Precision.
  • Do not operate in average amounts. Be as precise as you can. Work with figures, numbers and data as surgeon works with a scalpel. What is exactly the right measure? Study theory of probability. It is one of the basic skills of being right.
• Scholarship.
  • Be a person of many sciences. Nothing good has come from a single place. Usually true advancements is an achievement of conjuction from several fields, unique alloy of opinions different experts. Zettelkasten is basically stand alone scholar tool of research, as Alexey has written in one of his notes.. It allows to put together atomic ideas from several fields.
• Void
  • Don't get the idea of the void. It means to be ready to make mistakes, or what?

BIO

Keywords:

Reference:

1. https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues

Related: Good case of rationalization is [[Harry Potter and the methods of rationality]]