On the other hand, imagine that you have a magical button, and if you press it, all not-sufficiently-correct-by-LW-standards mentions of rationality (or logic, or science) would disappear from the world.
To me it seems like you conflate the brand of rationality and a body of ideas with rationality as defined in our wiki “Rationality is the characteristic of thinking and acting optimally. An agent is rational if it wields its intelligence in such a way as to maximize the convergence between its beliefs and reality”.
To me it seems that Gleb is picking the low-hanging fruit that most rationalists wouldn’t even touch for… let’s admit it… status reasons. He talks to the outgroup, using the language of the outgroup.
Stephan Schubert’s Face Checking 2.0 is also a rationalist way to speak to the masses. There’s nothing that makes me fringe about that Huffington Post article. It’s in a language that a broad audience can appreciate.
The same goes for other ClearerThinking content.
The medium of quizes is easily accessible to a broad public but more active than reading theory laden articles.
As OrphanWilde correctly pointed out in his post, if something feels cognitively easy to you and does not make you cringe at how low-level it is, then you are not the target audience. Similarly, you are not the target audience if something is overwhelming for you to read. You are the target audience for the Fact Checking article. It’s written for your level, and that of other rationalists.
That leads me to a broader point. ClearerThinking is a great site! In fact, I just had a great conversation with Spencer Greenberg about collaborating. As he told me, ClearerThinking targets people who are already pretty interested in improving their decision-making, and want to take the time to do quizzes and online courses.
Intentional Insights hits a couple of levels below that. It goes for people who are not aware that the human mind is suboptimal in its decision-making structure, and helps make them aware of it. Then, it gives them easy tools and resources to improve their thinking. After sufficient improvement, we aim to provide them with tools from ClearerThinking. Spencer and I specifically talked about ways we could collaborate together to set up a good channel to send people on to ClearerThinking in an organized and cohesive manner, and we’ll be working on setting that up. For more on our strategy, see my comment below.
To me it seems like you conflate the brand of rationality and a body of ideas with rationality as defined in our wiki “Rationality is the characteristic of thinking and acting optimally. An agent is rational if it wields its intelligence in such a way as to maximize the convergence between its beliefs and reality”.
Stephan Schubert’s Face Checking 2.0 is also a rationalist way to speak to the masses. There’s nothing that makes me fringe about that Huffington Post article. It’s in a language that a broad audience can appreciate. The same goes for other ClearerThinking content.
The medium of quizes is easily accessible to a broad public but more active than reading theory laden articles.
As OrphanWilde correctly pointed out in his post, if something feels cognitively easy to you and does not make you cringe at how low-level it is, then you are not the target audience. Similarly, you are not the target audience if something is overwhelming for you to read. You are the target audience for the Fact Checking article. It’s written for your level, and that of other rationalists.
That leads me to a broader point. ClearerThinking is a great site! In fact, I just had a great conversation with Spencer Greenberg about collaborating. As he told me, ClearerThinking targets people who are already pretty interested in improving their decision-making, and want to take the time to do quizzes and online courses.
Intentional Insights hits a couple of levels below that. It goes for people who are not aware that the human mind is suboptimal in its decision-making structure, and helps make them aware of it. Then, it gives them easy tools and resources to improve their thinking. After sufficient improvement, we aim to provide them with tools from ClearerThinking. Spencer and I specifically talked about ways we could collaborate together to set up a good channel to send people on to ClearerThinking in an organized and cohesive manner, and we’ll be working on setting that up. For more on our strategy, see my comment below.