I think most of the strength of rationalism hasn’t come from the skill of being rational, but rather from the rationality memeplex that has developed around it. Forming accurate beliefs from scratch is a lot more work and happens very slowly compared to learning them from someone else. Compare how much an individual PHD student achieves in his/her doctorate compared to the body of knowledge that they learn before making an original contribution. Likewise, someone who’s practised the art of rationality will be instinctively better at distilling information into accurate beliefs. As a result they might have put together slightly more accurate beliefs about the world given what they’ve seen, but that slight increase in knowledge due to rationality isn’t going to hold a candle to the massive pile of cached ideas and arguments that have been debated to hell and back in the rat-sphere.
To paint a clearer picture of what I’m getting at, suppose we model success as:
[Success] ~ ([Knowledge]*[Effort/Opportunities])
I.E. Success is proportional to how much you know, times how many opportunities you have to make use of it/how much effort you make to preform actions that you have chosen base on that knowledge. I think this could be further broken down into:
[Success] ~ ([Local Cultural Knowledge]+[Personal Knowledge])*[Effort/Opportunities]
I.E. Some knowledge is culturally transmitted, and some knowledge is acquired by interacting with the world. Then being a good practitioner of rationality outside the rationality community corresponds to maybe this:
[Success] ~ (1.05*[Local Cultural Knowledge]+1.05*[Personal Knowledge]))*[Effort/Opportunities]
In other words, a good rationalist will be better than the equivalent person at filtering though their cultural knowledge to identify the valuable aspects, and they’ll be better at taking in all the information that they have personally observed, and used it to form beliefs. However, humans already need to be good at this, and evolution has spent a large amount of time honing heuristics for making this happen. So any additional gains in information efficiency will be hard won and possibly pyrrhic gains after extensive practice.
However, I think it’s better to model an individual in the rationalist community as:
[Success] ~ ([Local Cultural Knowledge]+[Personal Knowledge]+[Rationalist Cultural Knowledge]))*[Effort/Opportunities]
LessWrong and the adjacent rat-sphere has fostered a community of individuals who all care about forming accurate beliefs about a very broad set of topics, and a focus on the topic of forming accurate beliefs. I think that because of this, the cultural knowledge that has been put together by the rationalist community has exceptionally high “quality” compared to what you would find locally.
Anyone who comes to LW will be exposed to a very large pile of new cultural knowledge, and will be able to put this knowledge into practice when the opportunity comes or they put in effort. I think that the value of this cultural knowledge vastly exceeds any gains that one could reasonably make by being a good rationalist.
A rationalist benefiting from LW doesn’t look like someone going over a bunch of information and pulling out better conclusions or ideas than an equivalent non-rationalist. Rather, it looks like someone remembering some concept or idea they read in a blog post, and putting it into practice or letting it influence their decision when the opportunity shows itself.
Off the top of my head, some of the ideas that I’ve invoked or have influenced me IRL to positive effect have been rationalist taboo, meditation, CO2 Levels, everything surrounding AI risk, and the notion of effective altruism. To a lesser extent, I would also say that rat fiction has also influenced me. I can’t produce any evidence that I’ve benefited from it, but characters like HJPEV and the Comet King have become something like role models for me and this has definitely influenced my personality and behaviour.
The question I think we should ask ourselves then, is has the art of rationality allowed us to put together a repository of cultural knowledge with an unusually high quality compared to what you would see in daily life.
The question I think we should ask ourselves then, is has the art of rationality allowed us to put together a repository of cultural knowledge with an unusually high quality compared to what you would see in daily life.
Yep. A group can usually collect much more knowledge than an individual. But the individual can (a) choose the group, and (b) contribute to its knowledge. From selfish perspective, the most important result of rationality is recognizing other rational people and choosing to learn from them. Luckily, information is free, so more people taking the knowledge doesn’t increase the costs of those who generate it.
I think most of the strength of rationalism hasn’t come from the skill of being rational, but rather from the rationality memeplex that has developed around it. Forming accurate beliefs from scratch is a lot more work and happens very slowly compared to learning them from someone else. Compare how much an individual PHD student achieves in his/her doctorate compared to the body of knowledge that they learn before making an original contribution. Likewise, someone who’s practised the art of rationality will be instinctively better at distilling information into accurate beliefs. As a result they might have put together slightly more accurate beliefs about the world given what they’ve seen, but that slight increase in knowledge due to rationality isn’t going to hold a candle to the massive pile of cached ideas and arguments that have been debated to hell and back in the rat-sphere.
To paint a clearer picture of what I’m getting at, suppose we model success as:
[Success] ~ ([Knowledge]*[Effort/Opportunities])
I.E. Success is proportional to how much you know, times how many opportunities you have to make use of it/how much effort you make to preform actions that you have chosen base on that knowledge. I think this could be further broken down into:
[Success] ~ ([Local Cultural Knowledge]+[Personal Knowledge])*[Effort/Opportunities]
I.E. Some knowledge is culturally transmitted, and some knowledge is acquired by interacting with the world. Then being a good practitioner of rationality outside the rationality community corresponds to maybe this:
[Success] ~ (1.05*[Local Cultural Knowledge]+1.05*[Personal Knowledge]))*[Effort/Opportunities]
In other words, a good rationalist will be better than the equivalent person at filtering though their cultural knowledge to identify the valuable aspects, and they’ll be better at taking in all the information that they have personally observed, and used it to form beliefs. However, humans already need to be good at this, and evolution has spent a large amount of time honing heuristics for making this happen. So any additional gains in information efficiency will be hard won and possibly pyrrhic gains after extensive practice.
However, I think it’s better to model an individual in the rationalist community as:
[Success] ~ ([Local Cultural Knowledge]+[Personal Knowledge]+[Rationalist Cultural Knowledge]))*[Effort/Opportunities]
LessWrong and the adjacent rat-sphere has fostered a community of individuals who all care about forming accurate beliefs about a very broad set of topics, and a focus on the topic of forming accurate beliefs. I think that because of this, the cultural knowledge that has been put together by the rationalist community has exceptionally high “quality” compared to what you would find locally.
Anyone who comes to LW will be exposed to a very large pile of new cultural knowledge, and will be able to put this knowledge into practice when the opportunity comes or they put in effort. I think that the value of this cultural knowledge vastly exceeds any gains that one could reasonably make by being a good rationalist.
A rationalist benefiting from LW doesn’t look like someone going over a bunch of information and pulling out better conclusions or ideas than an equivalent non-rationalist. Rather, it looks like someone remembering some concept or idea they read in a blog post, and putting it into practice or letting it influence their decision when the opportunity shows itself.
Off the top of my head, some of the ideas that I’ve invoked or have influenced me IRL to positive effect have been rationalist taboo, meditation, CO2 Levels, everything surrounding AI risk, and the notion of effective altruism. To a lesser extent, I would also say that rat fiction has also influenced me. I can’t produce any evidence that I’ve benefited from it, but characters like HJPEV and the Comet King have become something like role models for me and this has definitely influenced my personality and behaviour.
The question I think we should ask ourselves then, is has the art of rationality allowed us to put together a repository of cultural knowledge with an unusually high quality compared to what you would see in daily life.
Yep. A group can usually collect much more knowledge than an individual. But the individual can (a) choose the group, and (b) contribute to its knowledge. From selfish perspective, the most important result of rationality is recognizing other rational people and choosing to learn from them. Luckily, information is free, so more people taking the knowledge doesn’t increase the costs of those who generate it.