I have several friends in New York who are a match to my Rationalist friends in age, class, intelligence etc. and who:
Pick S&P 500 stocks based on CNBC and blogs because their intuition tells them they’ve beat the market (but they don’t check or track it, just remember the winners).
Stay in jobs they hate because they don’t have a robust decision process for making such a switch (I used goal factoring, Yoda timer job research, and decision matrices to decide where to work).
Go so back asswards about dating that it hurts to watch (because they can’t think about it systematically).
Retweet Trump with comment.
Throw the most boring parties.
Spend thousands of dollars on therapists but would never do a half-hour debugging session with a friend because “that would be weird”.
In general, live mostly within “social reality” where the only question is “is this weird/acceptable” and never “is this true/false”.
Now perhaps Rationalist self-improvement can’t help them, but if you’re reading LessWrong you may be someone who may snap out of social reality long enough for Rationality to change your life significantly.
> if you want to propose some kind of rationalist self-help exercise that I should try
Different strokes for different folks. You can go through alkjash’s Hammertime Sequence and pick one, although even there the one that he rates lowest (goal factoring) is the one that was the most influential in my own life. You must be friends with CFAR instructors/mentors who know your personality and pressing issues better than I do and can recommend and teach a useful exercise.
Agreed, I see a major problem with an argument that seems to imply that since advice exists elsewhere/wasn’t invented by rationality techniques, a meta-heuristic for aggregating trustworthy sources isn’t hugely valuable.
In general, live mostly within “social reality” where the only question is “is this weird/acceptable” and never “is this true/false”.
It seems to me like people who primarily think in terms of weird/acceptable never join the rationality in the first place. Or do you believe that our community has taught people who used to think in those terms to think otherwise?
As I said, someone who is 100% in thrall to social reality will probably not be reading this. But once you peek outside the bubble there is still a long way to enlightenment: first learning how signaling, social roles, tribal impulses etc. shape your behavior so you can avoid their worst effects, then learning to shape the rules of social reality to suit your own goals. Our community is very helpful for getting the first part right, it certainly has been for me. And hopefully we can continue fruitfully exploring the second part too.
I have several friends in New York who are a match to my Rationalist friends in age, class, intelligence etc. and who:
Pick S&P 500 stocks based on CNBC and blogs because their intuition tells them they’ve beat the market (but they don’t check or track it, just remember the winners).
Stay in jobs they hate because they don’t have a robust decision process for making such a switch (I used goal factoring, Yoda timer job research, and decision matrices to decide where to work).
Go so back asswards about dating that it hurts to watch (because they can’t think about it systematically).
Retweet Trump with comment.
Throw the most boring parties.
Spend thousands of dollars on therapists but would never do a half-hour debugging session with a friend because “that would be weird”.
In general, live mostly within “social reality” where the only question is “is this weird/acceptable” and never “is this true/false”.
Now perhaps Rationalist self-improvement can’t help them, but if you’re reading LessWrong you may be someone who may snap out of social reality long enough for Rationality to change your life significantly.
> if you want to propose some kind of rationalist self-help exercise that I should try
Different strokes for different folks. You can go through alkjash’s Hammertime Sequence and pick one, although even there the one that he rates lowest (goal factoring) is the one that was the most influential in my own life. You must be friends with CFAR instructors/mentors who know your personality and pressing issues better than I do and can recommend and teach a useful exercise.
Agreed, I see a major problem with an argument that seems to imply that since advice exists elsewhere/wasn’t invented by rationality techniques, a meta-heuristic for aggregating trustworthy sources isn’t hugely valuable.
It seems to me like people who primarily think in terms of weird/acceptable never join the rationality in the first place. Or do you believe that our community has taught people who used to think in those terms to think otherwise?
As I said, someone who is 100% in thrall to social reality will probably not be reading this. But once you peek outside the bubble there is still a long way to enlightenment: first learning how signaling, social roles, tribal impulses etc. shape your behavior so you can avoid their worst effects, then learning to shape the rules of social reality to suit your own goals. Our community is very helpful for getting the first part right, it certainly has been for me. And hopefully we can continue fruitfully exploring the second part too.
What is the error that you’re implying here?
Could be a don’t feed the troll error.