I don’t find the concept of small “r” rationalist helpful because what you describe to me actually sounds like “understand most of Kahneman and Traversky’s work” and I wouldn’t refer to that as rationalism but cognitive psychology. I think in general even small r rationalism tries to repackage concepts in ways that are only new or interesting to people who haven’t studied psychology and in my opinion does so mostly in very distinct ways that tend to have non-stated underlying philosophical assumptions like objectivism and Kantian ideals. But cognitive psych doesn’t (shouldn’t?) have to be applied in those ways. Probably just read Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and get on with your day? That’s how I got into EA, and it does whatever ur describing as small r rationalism better than small r rationalism (if that makes sense?) without all the underlying non-stated assumptions that comes with small r rationality and the ties with the big R community
Reducing rationality to “understand most of Kahneman and Tversky’s work” and cognitive psychology would be extremely narrow and miss most of the topic.
To quickly get some independent perspective, I recommend reading the Overview of the handbook part of “The Handbook of Rationality” (2021, MIT Press, open access). For an extremely crude calibration: the Handbook has 65 chapters. I’m happy to argue at least half of them cover topics relevant to the EA project. About ~3 are directly about Kahneman and Tversky’s work. So, by this proxy, you would miss about 90% of whats relevant.
Yeah I guess I’m saying probably the rest is not relevant or important for EA and that’s why I think little r rationality can be scrapped in favor of the important bits I highlighted. I realize I left out epistemology so like, just study epistemology and cognitive psych and that is the relevant bit for EA (in an admittedly oversimplified way to make a point).
I don’t find the concept of small “r” rationalist helpful because what you describe to me actually sounds like “understand most of Kahneman and Traversky’s work” and I wouldn’t refer to that as rationalism but cognitive psychology. I think in general even small r rationalism tries to repackage concepts in ways that are only new or interesting to people who haven’t studied psychology and in my opinion does so mostly in very distinct ways that tend to have non-stated underlying philosophical assumptions like objectivism and Kantian ideals. But cognitive psych doesn’t (shouldn’t?) have to be applied in those ways. Probably just read Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and get on with your day? That’s how I got into EA, and it does whatever ur describing as small r rationalism better than small r rationalism (if that makes sense?) without all the underlying non-stated assumptions that comes with small r rationality and the ties with the big R community
Reducing rationality to “understand most of Kahneman and Tversky’s work” and cognitive psychology would be extremely narrow and miss most of the topic.
To quickly get some independent perspective, I recommend reading the Overview of the handbook part of “The Handbook of Rationality” (2021, MIT Press, open access). For an extremely crude calibration: the Handbook has 65 chapters. I’m happy to argue at least half of them cover topics relevant to the EA project. About ~3 are directly about Kahneman and Tversky’s work. So, by this proxy, you would miss about 90% of whats relevant.
Yeah I guess I’m saying probably the rest is not relevant or important for EA and that’s why I think little r rationality can be scrapped in favor of the important bits I highlighted. I realize I left out epistemology so like, just study epistemology and cognitive psych and that is the relevant bit for EA (in an admittedly oversimplified way to make a point).