This is a self-review, looking back at the post after 13 months.
I have made a few edits to the post, including three major changes: 1. Sharpening my definition of what counts as “Rationalist self-improvement” to reduce confusion. This post is about improved epistemics leading to improved life outcomes, which I don’t want to conflate with some CFAR techniques that are basically therapy packaged for skeptical nerds. 2. Addressing Scott’s “counterargument from market efficiency” that we shouldn’t expect to invent easy self-improvement techniques that haven’t been tried. 3. Talking about selection bias, which was the major part missing from the original discussion. My 2020 post The Treacherous Path to Rationality is somewhat of a response to this one, concluding that we should expect Rationality to work mostly for those who self-select into it and that we’ll see limited returns to trying to teach it more broadly.
The past 13 months also provided more evidence in favor of epistemic Rationality being ever more instrumentally useful. In 2020 I saw a few Rationalist friends fund successful startups and several friends cross the $100k mark for cryptocurrency earnings. And of course, LessWrong led the way on early and accurate analysis of most COVID-related things. One result of this has been increased visibility and legitimacy, and of course another is that Rationalists have a much lower number of COVID cases than all other communities I know.
In general, this post is aimed at someone who discovered Rationality recently but is lacking the push to dive deep and start applying it to their actual life decisions. I think the main point still stands: if you’re Rationalist enough to think seriously about it, you should do it.
This is a self-review, looking back at the post after 13 months.
I have made a few edits to the post, including three major changes:
1. Sharpening my definition of what counts as “Rationalist self-improvement” to reduce confusion. This post is about improved epistemics leading to improved life outcomes, which I don’t want to conflate with some CFAR techniques that are basically therapy packaged for skeptical nerds.
2. Addressing Scott’s “counterargument from market efficiency” that we shouldn’t expect to invent easy self-improvement techniques that haven’t been tried.
3. Talking about selection bias, which was the major part missing from the original discussion. My 2020 post The Treacherous Path to Rationality is somewhat of a response to this one, concluding that we should expect Rationality to work mostly for those who self-select into it and that we’ll see limited returns to trying to teach it more broadly.
The past 13 months also provided more evidence in favor of epistemic Rationality being ever more instrumentally useful. In 2020 I saw a few Rationalist friends fund successful startups and several friends cross the $100k mark for cryptocurrency earnings. And of course, LessWrong led the way on early and accurate analysis of most COVID-related things. One result of this has been increased visibility and legitimacy, and of course another is that Rationalists have a much lower number of COVID cases than all other communities I know.
In general, this post is aimed at someone who discovered Rationality recently but is lacking the push to dive deep and start applying it to their actual life decisions. I think the main point still stands: if you’re Rationalist enough to think seriously about it, you should do it.
Is what all forms of education aim at.