If most failures of rationality are adaptively self-serving motivated reasoning, choosing to be an aspiring rationalist is basically aspiring to a kind of self-hobbling.
This is almost exactly counter to “rationality is systematized winning.”
Suppose that we’re living in a world where everyone is negotiating for their interests all the time, and almost everyone is engaged in motivated cognition that supports their interests in the ongoing negotiation, and that this causes them to do better for themselves on net. The rationalist is the guy who’s doing his best to weaken his negotiation position by “overcoming his (self-serving) biases”
. . .
Of course some domains reward rationality more than others, and some domains reward motivated reasoning more than others, and so the value of specializing in rationality depends on your goals and the domains you’re operating within. If your primary interests are physics, or math, or philosophy, or identifying and implementing policies that are abstractly welfare-maximizing, or if you’re smart enough to make a lot of money via finance, rationality is a better strategy.
If you’re mostly interested in your personal resources or welfare, and are not making money in a technical field where you succeed by being right, you maybe mostly win by getting other people “on your side” in a thousand different ways, and so motivated reasoning is more rewarded.
And indeed, if you have the option of compartmentalizing your rationality, so that you can use it only in the domains where getting the right answer matters, without it interfering with your ability to otherwise get the benefits of motivated cognition in advocating for your interests, that would be the best of both worlds.
musings and rough drafts 