I've been reading a new blog, Overcoming Bias: A forum for those serious about trying to overcome their own biases in beliefs and actions. It's a group blog, or forum as they style it (kinda old timey that), with some names I've paid attention to before such as Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, as well as a dozen other less familiar names, brought to us by Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

It has been threatening to be interesting and today has done so: The Martial Art of Rationality.

Alas, our minds respond less readily to our will than our hands. Muscles are evolutionarily ancient subjects of neural control, while cognitive reflectivity is a comparatively more recent innovation. We shouldn't be surprised that muscles are easier to use than brains. But it is not wise to neglect the latter training because it is more difficult. It is not by bigger muscles that the human species rose to prominence upon Earth.

If you live in an urban area, you probably don't need to walk very far to find a martial arts dojo. Why aren't there dojos that teach rationality? One reason, perhaps, is that it's harder to verify skill. To rise a level in Tae Kwon Do, you might need to break a board of a certain width. If you succeed, all the onlookers can see and applaud. If you fail, your teacher can watch how you shape a fist, and check if you shape it correctly. If not, the teacher holds out a hand and makes a fist correctly, so that you can observe how to do so. Within martial arts schools, techniques of muscle have been refined and elaborated over generations. Techniques of rationality are harder to pass on, even to the most willing student. It is also harder to give impressive public exhibitions of rationality. This may partially explain why there are no rationality dojos as yet.

I'm tempted to abuse Brian Hayes' quote out of context again, "even as metaphor it's nonsense", but the metaphor does work a bit even if the cognitive science is lacking. As discussed recently in It's Not Noise there's an awful lot of brain work in probabilistic sensorimotor learning, and as some have speculated it is due to the sensory cortex that humans have their big brains, and that the consciously reasoning pre-frontal cortex is a late addition tacked on as an observer function though the heavy lifting is done elsewhere.

Such understanding as I have of rationality, I acquired in the course of wrestling with the challenge of Artificial General Intelligence (an endeavor which, to actually succeed, would require sufficient mastery of rationality to build a complete working rationalist out of toothpicks and rubber bands). . .

Trying to synthesize a personal art of rationality, using the science of rationality, may prove awkward: One imagines trying to invent a martial art using an abstract theory of physics, game theory, and human anatomy. But humans are not reflectively blind; we do have a native instinct for introspection. The inner eye is not sightless; but it sees blurrily, with systematic distortions. We need, then, to apply the science to our intuitions, to use the abstract knowledge to correct our mental movements and augment our metacognitive skills. We are not writing a computer program to make a string puppet execute martial arts forms; it is our own mental limbs that we must move. Therefore we must connect theory to practice. We must come to see what the science means, for ourselves, for our daily inner life.

And we must, above all, figure out how to communicate the skill; which may not be a matter for declarative statements alone. Martial artists spar with each other, execute standard forms, and are watched throughout by their teachers. Calculus students do homework, and check their answers. Olympic runners continually try to beat their best previous time, as measured by a stopwatch.

How to communicate procedural skills of rationality, or measure them, is probably the single largest open issue that stands between humanity and rationality dojos - at least it's the part of the problem that most baffles me. Meanwhile I lecture. So does anyone out there have ideas?

Comments are open at the forum if you have the where with to do with.

As I see it there is some confusion here though the subject is indeed worthy. I'd frame it a bit differently, perhaps with more indulgence and humor for my idiot savant intuitions, knowing that they are the output of complex calculations I could not consciously perform. They may be wrong sometimes, or may be right when my conscious intentions are in fact wrong, and so merely appear to be mistaken, but it's an editing activity rather than a pitched struggle against my nature. Sometimes the crazy ideas are good, sometimes not, timing matters as well as content. I might try to apply some of the ideas from group problem solving spoken of by Scott Page, to my inner group of heuristically diverse mental faculties. We are better as a team than individuals, but that requires communication and tolerance for different methods.