-> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
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-> Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
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-> [...]
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-> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
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-> You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
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-> The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
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-> One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know _what_ you don't know, you don't know how _much_ you don't know, and you don't know how much you _needed_ to know.
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-> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
+Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be allowed to notice the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is obviously happening if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's some number of years and some number of thousands of words[^wordcounts] of litigating the object level (about gender) and the meta level (about the philosophy of categorization) after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level of politics and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been empirically falsified.[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]