[This section first starts off with a quick intro to what rationality is. We go over the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality.]

This is a book on getting your shit together.

Ahem.

Actually, this is a book on rationality. But “getting your shit together” isn’t far from the mark. (It’s catchier, too.)

So. Let’s clear up a potential misunderstanding first: The word “rationality” as I’m using it here isn’t the academic term (like how it’s used in economics) or the story trope term (like the emotionless Spock from Star Trek).

Actually both of those images give off the wrong connotations.

Rather, it’s about this loose collection of ideas that have sprouted in the past decade or so that centers around human minds and how they work.

It’s usually split into two subsections: epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality:

Epistemic rationality is about trying to figure out what’s true. This is important because arguments (as just one example) can easily slip into poor reasoning and logical fallacies. Ideas in epistemic rationality try to help ease some of these problems. It looks into questions like what it exactly means to “have evidence” for your side or how to actually listen to other people’s counterarguments.

While epistemic rationality looks at truth, instrumental rationality looks at achieving our goals. Sometimes, for example, our energy to get things done can falter. Other times, we may find a lack of time management to hurt our ability to finish our tasks. Instrumental rationality is about finding the best ways to resolve these obstacles to get what we want. Motivation, productivity, and habits all fall into this field.

The need for both types of rationality arises because our reasoning process isn’t perfect. Our thinking can be subject to cognitive biases, psychological quirks of our brain, which can lead our thinking astray.

(Don’t worry if you don’t know much about biases. We’ll go over a few of them more in the next section.)

While the two sections of rationality might initially seem rather separate, linked only by cognitive biases, the distinction between the two is really quite fuzzy.

After all, a productivity hack only works if it’s based off things that really are true. You could write “I got 10 hours of work done today!” on a sheet of paper, but you can’t actually get 10 hours of work done.

It just won’t happen, even if you think that reality works like that. You’ll just end up with broken expectations.

We want things that are based in the real world because they really work. For figuring out what thing “really work”, we might need evidence and reasons. And for that, we’re back again to epistemic rationality.

The two, then, are intertwined.

But I’m not taking the cop-out and just saying “both things are important” and leaving it at that. There are certain times where you really would prefer one over the other, and it’s good to take note that.

For example, it’s probably not a good idea to spend all your time trying to verify all the information you read in textbooks (i.e. practicing epistemic rationality). At some point, the balance tips over to just using what you already know (i.e. practicing instrumental rationality).

We’ll be exploring other dichotomies later on, and I just think it’s important to explicitly state that “acknowledging that both sides are important” ≠ “you always want an equal balance of both”.

In the case of this book, I’ll be focusing more on instrumental rationality because I think that’s usually more interesting to read, and I also think it’s typically more readily applicable to everyday life.

My approach throughout this book is to try and use the instrumental rationality stuff as the main idea, and slowly intersperse some of the sections with stuff on epistemic rationality.