Instrumental Rationality

• there exist tradeoffs, there exist choices, there exists strategy: "instrumental rationality"
  • there's a big can of weeds here wrt game theory, optimization, etc; in this respect I'm also kind of shallowly read
  • symmetrically to what we discussed with epistemic rationality, again we can interpret this definition narrowly: the goal here is indeed to achieve our goals, to successfully get what we want (well, again, this gets hairy wrt spirituality, but we're not there yet)
    • sometimes you'll also hear "satisfaction of our values"
      • even avowed rationalists are like, yes! I have rich humane values! go cry and laugh and dance and do the worthwhile things!
  • naturally, there's going to be problems here. without even getting into awakening territory here, it's just, well, should you get what you want? isn't that harmful? what about colonialism, or rape, or who knows what?
    • part of the claim here, and this is a large part of the context of the understanding of values in a rationalist frame, is that "success" or something is not narrowly success in a competitive context, despite the language that's used
      • maybe we could define it, more richly, as "robust enactment of value"
        • yeah yeah but virtue ethics too, or something. obviously this is a frame
        • I think I'm sort of sympathetic to virtue ethics and I think I have a weaker commitment to instrumental rationality as a theory
        • I think, tho, that if you can't do these sorts of calculations you're going to just leave value on the floor, etc etc
• this definition is importantly agnostic wrt your values, this is either very clean, or presents problems if you're like "wait, but this is kind of degenerate and cold and wrong"--we'll touch on this next
• elaborate or refer back to "straw vulcan" here
• Unclear if I want to talk about newcomblike problems here. I can say something like "even in this domain we're having metaphysical debates"
• "effective" means "achieving the goals as specified"