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>> and the desire to reach as accurate as possible answers

Something that I believe I have genuinely noticed is that some/many[1] Rationalists have a tendency to apply some sort of "rational" processing to any given idea and then reach their conclusion, but whether the processing that is actually applied (as opposed to what the person perceives themselves to have applied) is substantially different than standard human heuristic processing with post-hoc rationalization[2] (as opposed to rationalism) applied on top of it seems quite questionable to me.

[1] Any hypothesis is true to the degree that it is actually true - everyone is free to have their opinion, but the actual objective state of reality "is what it is".

[2] To what degree is the difference between Rationalist (as opposed to rational) and "normal" thinking & belief formation a function of differences before or after the post-hoc divide?

Very roughly I think you are saying that it is unclear whether rationalists are thinking differently, or whether the think in the same fashion and just think that they think differently?

I suspect their are elements of both: I believe some members of the rationality community do routinely think in a different way to many other people, but I also believe that there is some post hoc rationalisation (as you put it) in the community as well.

Basically yes. Of course, they do think differently to some degree, but my intuition is that the end result is likely not nearly as impressive as they perceive it to be - post-hoc rationalization (and its various siblings) is a powerful force with substantial cloaking abilities, and while many intelligent people have abstract/academic knowledge of this, really "knowing" it does not come naturally - in fact, the opposite seems to be the case...such is the nature of the evolved human mind.

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