Meta-Rationality
= "meta-rationality: ways of using rational systems more effectively by examining their relationships with their surrounds". [1]
Description
David Chapman:
"Meta-rationality operates in the territory beyond the boundaries of fixed understanding. It recognizes, works with, and transcends the limits of rationality. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods." (https://meaningness.com/eggplant)
Characteristics
David Chapman:
- "Meta-rationality isn’t about solving problems; that’s what rationality is for. Meta-rationality can help you use rationality more effectively. By understanding problems and potential solution approaches in broader contexts, you become more likely to solve them—but you’ll do that rationally. You’ll also get better at deciding which problems are worth solving, and effective ways of dealing with problems other than “solving” them.
- Meta-rationality doesn’t run on principles. Demanding that it does makes it impossible to learn.
- Meta-rationality also doesn’t have methods.
- Meta-rationality is a different kind of thing from rationality, so you can’t learn it the same way. You learn rationality by getting principles and methods from lectures or textbooks, and then working through toy exercise problems. That won’t work for meta-rationality."
(https://metarationality.com/meta-rationality-resistance-enjoyment)
Discussion
David Chapman:
"Rationality is an unnatural, hard-won achievement. Developing it takes years of hard, often unpleasant work. It requires subordinating your emotions and relationships to systematic discipline. You must leave behind the comfortable, natural human way of being—and, painfully, sometimes you have to leave behind friends who can’t also move beyond it. For several years, before you have consolidated rationality, you often fall back into the pre-rational way of being—and rediscover its failure modes. Once you have stabilized rationality, you absolutely don’t want to allow it to be undermined in any way.
Meta-rationalism calls into question rationalism: the belief that rationality is all there is to effective thinking and acting. Rationalist eternalism promises certainty that its principles are correct, the possibility of complete technical understanding, and control over your life, as well as over material systems. As long as these promises remain plausible, meta-rationality can seem threatening.
Rationality also gets questioned by irrational and anti-rational ideologies (“woo”). If you don’t understand what meta-rationality is, meta-rationalist explanations make no sense, so they are easy to mistake for that sort of obscurantist mystical nonsense. This is especially likely if you are emotionally motivated to dismiss meta-rationalism because you are not fully confident of your ability to maintain rationality in difficult situations, and fear having your commitment to it weakened.
If you aren’t fully confident in your own rationality, when it fails, it’s natural to assume that it’s your fault for doing it wrong. After all, you have spent many years trying to solve technical problems (from grade school geometry to PhD physics) and frequently you did get the answer wrong. That puzzling and frustrating experience is necessary for becoming rational.
Meta-rationalism starts to make sense only after you are fully confident in your ability to use rationality correctly, and you have have substantial experience with seeing “correct” solutions to technical problems fail in the real world. Then you know it’s not your own capacity for rationality that’s at fault, it’s rationality that’s limited and fallible.
Only curiosity can lead you into meta-rationality, because few environments offer support for developing it. You may hear about meta-rationality and become intrigued, but it’s more common to have to figure it out for yourself.
Difficulty in initially understanding what sort of thing is meta-rationality is analogous to the initial difficulty in understanding what sort of thing is rationality. In the same way rationality is not mostly a better way of relating to people (although it may also do that), meta-rationality is not mostly a better way of solving problems (although it may also do that).
Just as you solved problems when you were pre-rational, but often ineptly because you didn’t know how: once rational, you are already doing meta-rationality, but often ineptly, because you don’t know how, and don’t even know you are doing it.
You come to suspect that “solving problems” is not always either sufficient or necessary, even in technical work. Then you start to wonder “how and when and why does rationality work or not work?” Typically this curiosity begins for technical people around age 28.
Learning meta-rationality in service of problem-solving, somewhat reluctantly, is analogous with learning rationality in service of emotional and relational goals, somewhat reluctantly. That was: “My web development job pays enough to attract the sort of person I want to marry, but debugging is awful—I don’t really get it, and it makes my head hurt”.
Now you discover with dismay that the relationship between technical problems and real-world problems is much more complex than you had realized. The first step into meta-rationality is: “Maybe I can solve some problems more effectively if I try to figure out how and where and why my model connects with reality, but I hate dealing with all that messy squishy stuff.”
Increasingly, you understand that real-world situations are unfixably nebulous, and therefore perfect certainty, understanding, and control are impossible. Then you want to know: how can you deal with nebulosity, if not rationally? Presentations of meta-rationality may then be frustrating. “Just explain what the meta-rational reasoning methods are!” you say. “What are meta-rationality’s principles? Be specific! Where’s the textbook? Show me how to do this!”
Principles and procedures are to learning meta-rationality as emotions and relationships are to learning rationality. They transition from being the structure of understanding to objects of understanding.
You can’t fully understand what meta-rationality’s subject matter is until you can be meta-rational—just as you can’t fully understand what rationality means until you are rational. Meta-rationality doesn’t have principles. It is partly about the nature and functions of principles, and how to use them skillfully according to context. Meta-rationality isn’t about solving problems. It is partly about finding and choosing and formulating problems.
As you start to learn meta-rationality, unsuspected vistas open: enormous, enticing, exhilarating. You begin to see what sort of thing meta-rationality is—and so what sort of person you can become if you master it. Not “a problem-solving genius,” but someone whose way of being is wonder-filled, playfully creative, and effortlessly elegant. That may transform everything in your life: not just your work, but your emotions and relationships as well. Instead of being subject to a system of principles and procedures, you come to conjure with systems as a magical dance of transparent illusions."
(https://metarationality.com/meta-rationality-resistance-enjoyment)
Sources
David Chapman on the sources for understanding meta-rationality [2]:
Donald Schon
"Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action is the closest thing we have to a manual of meta-rationality.
Schön observed in detail how experts in five technical fields addressed nebulous problems. He found that technical rationality—“the formulas learned in graduate school”—doesn’t cut it. Those methods only apply when a problem has already been well-characterized—that is, translated into a formal vocabulary. That is not what a civil engineer encounters in the field: what you find there is water and rocks and dirt, and it’s a mess. It’s not what a project manager encounters in a tech company: what you find there is a bunch of people squabbling about a slipped schedule, and it’s a mess. Rationality solves formal problems, but that’s not what expert professionals do. They transform nebulous messes.
Meta-rationality requires understanding the relationship between a particular clear-cut rational system and a particular messy, nebulous reality. The “solution” to a slipped schedule undoubtedly involves fiddling with a GANTT chart, or some similar project-management formalism. However, the mess can’t be “solved” entirely, or mainly, in this formal domain. The manager needs to understand how the GANTT chart relates to what people are actually doing.
There can be no fixed method for this; it’s inherently improvisational. That does not imply mystical intuitive woo. It means a lot of well-thought-out practical activity, immersing yourself in the mess, and reflecting on how specific rational methods could work in this concrete situation.
Mastery of professional practice is not the ability to solve cut-and-dried problems. That’s for junior staff, straight out of school. Professional mastery is the ability to re-characterize a nebulous real-world situation as a collection of soluble technical problems." (https://meaningness.com/further-reading)
Robert Kegan
"Robert Kegan’s model of adult psychological development profoundly shapes my understanding of meta-rationality—as well as ethics, relationships, and society. I wrote about his work overall here.
His two major books are The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.
Kegan’s account of meta-rationality is frustratingly abstract, but his explanation of the ways it restructures the self gives insights not available elsewhere.
...
Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self is the most sophisticated explanation I’ve found of the ways we relate self and other, and the ways we relate to our selves.
The book strikes many readers as a major revelation. It’s not only intellectually fascinating, making sense of so much of our lives—it’s also useful in practice as a guide to radical personal transformation.
Other readers find nothing meaningful in it. Tentatively, I suspect that’s not because they miss the point, but because Kegan’s framework simply doesn’t apply to everyone.
...
Robert Kegan’s work began as an extension of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. I think Kegan’s stage 5 is the most sophisticated ethical framework available. It requires meta-rationality: relating different ethical systems to each other, and reflecting on their relationship with reality.
Among his several books, only The Evolving Self discusses ethics."
Kramer and Alstad
Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad’s The Guru Papers was mis-named. It discusses gurus only in passing.
Their book is a sprawling but brilliant discussion of the major topics of Meaningness—unity and diversity, self and other, sacred and profane, life-purpose, ethics, ultimate value, and so on. It is a memetic nosology—a classification of contagious harmful ideas, attitudes, and practices."
Book
* Book: The Eggplant. David Chapman
URL = https://meaningness.com/eggplant/
David Chapman:
1.
"Meta-rationality is a craft, not a systematic discipline. It is not taught in the university STEM curriculum, although it is vital for technical progress. Currently, it must be learned through apprenticeship and experience. This book is the first practical introduction.
Meta-rationality is rarer than rationality, and has more leverage, but it is so rarely recognized that I had to invent the word for it. It is an invisible power.
It’s sometimes acknowledged that senior professionals with years on the job can somehow deal effectively with problems that junior technical hotshots can’t. They “have a feel for things” that finds shortcuts through difficulties, devises better approaches in ways that can’t be explained at the time, and makes projects run smoothly. This value may be acknowledged in individuals, but its source is not named or inquired into.
A meta-rational insight may seem exciting, magic, an incomprehensible breakthrough, for those restricted to a rational framework. “Wow, how did they do it? How could I learn to cut through problems like that?” Alternatively, since the results are retrospectively understandable within a rational system, the insight may be attributed to luck, or to inscrutable “intuition,” and so overlooked. Competent technical rationality has considerable prestige; competent meta-rationality has none, despite its extreme value, because there has been no word for it.
This book aims to help you level up from systematic rationality to meta-rational competence. I wrote it for people with strong technical backgrounds; it uses mainly science and engineering examples. However, no specific knowledge is a prerequisite. Expertise in another discipline of rationality—organizational management for example—might do. All the same material could be treated using transformational business case studies; and indeed we will also look at a few of those.
Because meta-rationality operates on rational systems, mastery of at least one such system is a prerequisite. Because it selects among systems, or combines several, understanding the distinctive rationalities of multiple fields—ideally several quite different ones—is a plus.
Beyond that, meta-rationality is particularly useful when rationality isn’t working well. Its value comes into view when you have seen rational systems fail enough times that you start to notice patterns of limitations to their use in practice. You realize that solving technical problems within a fixed set of concepts and methods is not always adequate. You become increasingly curious about why, and what to do about it."
(https://meaningness.com/eggplant/introduction?)
2.
"This book aims to help you level up from systematic rationality to meta-rational competence. I wrote it for people with strong technical backgrounds; it uses mainly science and engineering examples. However, no specific knowledge is a prerequisite. Expertise in another discipline of rationality—organizational management for example—might do. All the same material could be treated using transformational business case studies; and indeed we will also look at a few of those.
Because meta-rationality operates on rational systems, mastery of at least one such system is a prerequisite. Because it selects among systems, or combines several, understanding the distinctive rationalities of multiple fields—ideally several quite different ones—is a plus.
Beyond that, meta-rationality is particularly useful when rationality isn’t working well. Its value comes into view when you have seen rational systems fail enough times that you start to notice patterns of limitations to their use in practice. You realize that solving technical problems within a fixed set of concepts and methods is not always adequate. You become increasingly curious about why, and what to do about it."
(https://metarationality.com/introduction?)