A Curriculum of the League of Extraordinary Learners.
Rationality is the art of
- making decisions that are in our best interest
- operating such that we produce the best outcomes for what we care about
Study of Rationality and Mathematical Logic which it is based on will reveal that there’s nothing in either which can help us find or form
- the truth
- our goals
- our values
- our life purpose
Rationality does NOT direct us to
- what we should care about
For the art of discovering our best interests and what we care about
- see Deep Rationality
- Rationality without Deep Rationality is irrational!
Rationality and Deep Rationality work together!
The distinctions of Rationality are extremely valuable
- Discovering what Reality offers
- Using valid reasoning about important issues
- Detecting Accidental and Malicious Fallacies
- and so forth
Rationality provides tools for determining if a reasoning process is valid or invalid and whether, given a degree of confidence in the truth of the premises, what degree of confidence would be justified in the conclusions.
The studying of Rationality is directed by our intellect with an awareness of our emotions. It is about the integrity of our thinking.
We face many challenges to acting Rationally, including
- Lack of awareness of our irrationality
- Insufficient Practice in the Art of Rationality
- Interference from Rhetorical Attacks
Power hierarchies are maintained by people who skillfully use Rhetoric to suppress your powers of discernment and manipulate your emotions. They are trying to use you for their purposes. In their eyes you are
- A Worker-Consumer Unit
- A Subject, rather than a Citizen
- An NPC
- A Tool
This is not a new understanding. The More than 2000 years ago, the great philosopher Socrates taught about the misuse of Rhetoric to persuade people to believe things regardless of the truth of the matter.
Unethical use of Rhetoric is standard in
- Political Speech
- Commercial Marketing
- Where else in our world?
Learning and Practicing The Methods of Rationality is a great help in defending against clever and malicious use of Rhetoric.
The Methods of Rationality are designed to
- Increase your ability to perceive what’s going on
- Empower you to make good choices
- Detect when you’re been fooled
- By malicious others
- By confusing situations
- By your own mind!
There are many ways of learning the Methods of Rationality. Traditionally learning the Methods of Rationality has started with studying psychology and logic and installing the methods into your life through practice.
A great new way of learning the Methods of Rationality is by reading the extraordinary and entertaining book Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is available free from the website hpmor.com.
The website lesswrong.com is full of wonderful resources for learning and practicing the Methods of Rationality, including the Sequences, a coherent introduction to Rationality, now also available as part of (another) book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI To Zombies.
There are a number of excellent resources at the LOEL webpage
An excellent new book on Rationality is
- Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
- by the incomparable Steven Pinker
See our Full List of Resources and please feel free to recommend others!
If you like the LOEL approach as described on our LOEL Github Repository and the Original LOEL Website and you like the idea of a powerful course on the Methods of Rationality, please consider joining the team developing this course! You can begin by getting a Github account and submitting an Issue to the LOEL Repository or using Github to send a message to the repository owner.