The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists, that is what I thought CFAR as an organization was pointed at.
When you are attempting something that many people have tried before- and to be clear, “come up with teachings to make people better” is something that many, many people have tried before- it may be useful to look and see what went wrong last time.
In the words of Scott Alexander, “I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. . . We’re almost certainly still making horrendous mistakes that people thirty years from now will rightly criticize us for. But they’re new mistakes. . . And I hope that maybe having a community dedicated to carefully checking its own thought processes and trying to minimize error in every way possible will make us have slightly fewer horrendous mistakes than people who don’t do that.”
This article right here? This is a skull. It should be noticed.
If the Best Of collection is for people who want a martial art of rationality to study then I believe this article is the most important entry, and it or the latest version of it will continue to be the most important entry until we have found the art at last. Thank you Anna for trying to build the art. Thank you for writing this and publishing it where anyone else about to attempt to build the art can take note of your mistakes and try to do better.
(Ideally it’s next to a dozen things we have found that we do think work! But maybe it’s next to them the way a surgeon general’s warning is next to a bottle of experimental pills.)
The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists, that is what I thought CFAR as an organization was pointed at.
When you are attempting something that many people have tried before- and to be clear, “come up with teachings to make people better” is something that many, many people have tried before- it may be useful to look and see what went wrong last time.
In the words of Scott Alexander, “I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. . . We’re almost certainly still making horrendous mistakes that people thirty years from now will rightly criticize us for. But they’re new mistakes. . . And I hope that maybe having a community dedicated to carefully checking its own thought processes and trying to minimize error in every way possible will make us have slightly fewer horrendous mistakes than people who don’t do that.”
This article right here? This is a skull. It should be noticed.
If the Best Of collection is for people who want a martial art of rationality to study then I believe this article is the most important entry, and it or the latest version of it will continue to be the most important entry until we have found the art at last. Thank you Anna for trying to build the art. Thank you for writing this and publishing it where anyone else about to attempt to build the art can take note of your mistakes and try to do better.
(Ideally it’s next to a dozen things we have found that we do think work! But maybe it’s next to them the way a surgeon general’s warning is next to a bottle of experimental pills.)