CFAR seems to be trying to be using (some of) our common beliefs to produce something useful to outsiders. And they get good ratings from workshop attendees.
True. CFAR is anything but insular. Their (excellent) workshops are based on outside research and they do very well to reach out to outsiders. They have Slovic and Stanovich as advisors, Kahneman has visited them, etc.
A couple questions- what portion of the workshop attendees self-selected from among people who were already interesting in rationality, compared to the portion that randomly stumbled upon it for some reason?
And even if it were from outsiders… I suppose that guards against the specific post-modernist failure mode. I think the checking by having to explain to outsiders isn’t the most important thing that checks engineering, though: the most important one is having to engineer things that actually work. So rationality producing people who are better at accomplishing their goals would be the ideal measure.
A couple questions- what portion of the workshop attendees self-selected from among people who were already interesting in rationality, compared to the portion that randomly stumbled upon it for some reason?
CFAR seems to be trying to be using (some of) our common beliefs to produce something useful to outsiders. And they get good ratings from workshop attendees.
True. CFAR is anything but insular. Their (excellent) workshops are based on outside research and they do very well to reach out to outsiders. They have Slovic and Stanovich as advisors, Kahneman has visited them, etc.
A couple questions- what portion of the workshop attendees self-selected from among people who were already interesting in rationality, compared to the portion that randomly stumbled upon it for some reason?
And even if it were from outsiders… I suppose that guards against the specific post-modernist failure mode. I think the checking by having to explain to outsiders isn’t the most important thing that checks engineering, though: the most important one is having to engineer things that actually work. So rationality producing people who are better at accomplishing their goals would be the ideal measure.
Don’t know, sorry.