-> 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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-> 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.
+I guess the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're playing the part well enough today, no one cares what you said in 2009?