Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Meta-rationality and frames, published by Richard Ngo on July 3, 2023 on LessWrong.

How should we think about thinking? In this sequence I outline an epistemology called meta-rationality, which in my opinion corrects a number of the mistakes of existing epistemologies. This first post will introduce some of the key concepts in meta-rationality (in particular the concept of frames), provide some of the intellectual context behind my conception of meta-rationality, and list the main claims I’ll be making in the next half-dozen posts. Those posts, which focus on introducing meta-rationality, constitute the first half of the sequence, and will be posted over the next month; the second half of the sequence focuses on more complex aspects of meta-rationality, and will be posted over the following month or two.

The traditional approach to epistemology is to focus on our knowledge of propositions like “there is a red car in the garage” or “I’m feeling thirsty”, which can in principle be evaluated as true or false. At a high level, meta-rationality is about making epistemology less reductionist by focusing less on assigning credences to isolated propositions like these, and more on the larger-scale mental entities which we actually use when thinking about complex domains—entities including:

Ideologies like environmentalism, neoliberalism, communism, longtermism, etc

Scientific paradigms like darwinism, keynesianism, quantum physics, deep learning, etc

Life philosophies like stoicism, conformism, careerism, etc

Moral drives like egalitarianism, patriotism, compassion, etc

Epistemologies like empiricism, scientism, various schools of rationalism, etc

Persistent personality traits like openness to experience, ambition, narcissism, etc

Wide-ranging heuristics like “follow common-sense advice” or “move as fast as possible”

I’ll call these frames. I’ll very roughly define a frame as a cluster of mental entities and processes (such as concepts, beliefs, heuristics, instincts, habits, skills, mental models, desires, values, etc) which tend to be activated in conjunction with each other. Under this definition, the extent to which a group of traits qualifies as a frame is a matter of degree, and we might focus on frames at different levels of abstraction in different contexts (although for convenience I'll mostly talk about frames in binary terms). For example, the concept of the voltage across a component in an electrical circuit tends to be associated with concepts like electrical current and resistance; and at a higher level, with knowledge about how to design circuits, and knowledge of electrical engineering more generally; and at an even higher level, with the idea that the world can be understood mechanistically and scientifically.

I’ll primarily be focusing on high-level frames which apply across a broad range of contexts, but many of my conclusions apply to low-level frames too. (For an in-depth exploration of low-level frames, such as the ones learned by young children, I recommend Minsky’s Society of Mind.)

The key contention of this sequence is that we should think about thinking primarily in terms of frames and the interactions between them. I’ll be giving detailed arguments for this claim in later posts; for now, I want to start off by appealing to high-level intuitions. We’re all familiar with the feeling of having strong beliefs that we can’t easily argue for, which are derived not from a straightforward argument, but from our background perspective on the world, which itself has been learned from many different datapoints. We don’t always apply the same perspective, though—we often act very differently in different contexts, or with different people. A particularly striking example: even people who are very good at building up a coherent understanding of complex domains...