Thinking Complete

In addition to my skepticism about the foundations of epistemic rationality , I’ve long had doubts about the effectiveness of instrumental rationality . In particular, I’m inclined to attribute the successes of highly competent people primarily to traits like intelligence, personality and work ethic, rather than specific habits of thought. But I’ve been unsure how to reconcile that with the fact that rationality techniques have proved useful to many people (including me). Here’s one very simple (and very leaky) abstraction for doing so. We can model success as a combination of doing useful things and avoiding making mistakes. As a particular example, we can model intellectual success as a combination of coming up with good ideas and avoiding bad ideas. I claim that rationality helps us avoid mistakes and bad ideas, but doesn’t help much in generating good ideas and useful work. Here I’m using a fairly intuitive and fuzzy notion of the seeking good/avoiding bad dichotomy. Obviousl

“The progress of Science is generally regarded as a kind of clean, rational advance along a straight ascending line; in fact it has followed a zigzag course, at times almost more bewildering than the evolution of political thought. The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most fundamental discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker’s performance than an electronic brain’s.” - Arthur Koestler The Sleepwalkers is an enlightening history of astronomy from the Ancient Greeks to Newton. It particularly focuses on three characters who shifted scientific consensus from the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system to a heliocentric one: Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. And characters is the right word, because Koestler digs into their personal quirks and foibles with gusto. If he is to be believed, these three key scientist