The self-help / life hacking / personal development community is actually better (in my opinion) at helping people become more rational than this site ostensibly devoted to rationality.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that claim, or why you believe it?
I love most of your recent comments, but on this point my impression differs. Yes, folks often learn more from practice, exercises, and deep-seated motivation than from having fun discussions. Yes, some self-help communities are better than LW at focussing on practice and life-improvement. But, AFAICT: no, that doesn’t mean these communities do more to boost their participants’ epistemic rationality. LW tries to teach folks skills for thinking usefully about abstract, tricky subjects on which human discussions often tend rapidly toward nonsense (e.g. existential risk, optimal philanthropy, or ethics). And LW, for all its flaws, seems to have had a fair amount of success in teaching its longer-term members (judging from my discussions with many such, in person and online) such skills as:
Never attempting to prove empirical facts from definitions;
Never saying or implying “but decent people shouldn’t believe X, so X is false”;
Being curious; participating in conversations with intent to update opinions, rather than merely to defend one’s prior beliefs;
Asking what potential evidence would move you, or would move the other person;
Not expecting all sides of a policy discussion to line up;
Aspiring to have true beliefs, rather than to make up rationalizations that back the group’s notions of virtue.
Do you mean: (1) self-help sites are more successful than LW at teaching the above, and similar, subskills; (2) the above subskills do not in fact boost folks’ ability to think non-nonsensically about abstract and tricky issues; or (3) LW may better boost folks’ ability to think through abstract issues, but that ability should not be called “rationality”?
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that claim, or why you believe it?
I love most of your recent comments, but on this point my impression differs. Yes, folks often learn more from practice, exercises, and deep-seated motivation than from having fun discussions. Yes, some self-help communities are better than LW at focussing on practice and life-improvement. But, AFAICT: no, that doesn’t mean these communities do more to boost their participants’ epistemic rationality. LW tries to teach folks skills for thinking usefully about abstract, tricky subjects on which human discussions often tend rapidly toward nonsense (e.g. existential risk, optimal philanthropy, or ethics). And LW, for all its flaws, seems to have had a fair amount of success in teaching its longer-term members (judging from my discussions with many such, in person and online) such skills as:
Never attempting to prove empirical facts from definitions;
Never saying or implying “but decent people shouldn’t believe X, so X is false”;
Being curious; participating in conversations with intent to update opinions, rather than merely to defend one’s prior beliefs;
Asking what potential evidence would move you, or would move the other person;
Not expecting all sides of a policy discussion to line up;
Aspiring to have true beliefs, rather than to make up rationalizations that back the group’s notions of virtue.
Do you mean: (1) self-help sites are more successful than LW at teaching the above, and similar, subskills; (2) the above subskills do not in fact boost folks’ ability to think non-nonsensically about abstract and tricky issues; or (3) LW may better boost folks’ ability to think through abstract issues, but that ability should not be called “rationality”?