That is awesome if true! But I worry that maybe this is instead about your selection of the sources you read.
Maybe over the years you learned to recognize the stupid sources and reject them quickly, and also over the years you have accumulated a nice collection of smart sources. That would be a pessimistic hypothesis.
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I also have a bounded-optimistic hypothesis, which is that only a fixed small fraction of people are rationality-compatible… but thanks to the spreading of our memes, now these people are better exposed to rationality, better exposed to each other, and more likely to blog.
In other words, I assume that the greatest improvement happened with the group of people who “have a potential to be rational, but they need a nudge to make it click”. As opposed to the past, now these people (1) have the other sources that can nudge them; and (2) if they succeed to become rational, they won’t be alone doing so.
Seems to me that in the past, there were rational individuals out there, but they were a small minority at any website. And if they made their own blogs, most commenters there would be deeply irrational. Today there is a rationalist community (and a much larger community of people who are influenced by the rationalist community even if they don’t consider themselves being a part of it), and if you start your own blog, you can attract readers from there. There is a sufficiently large group of people who share a tacit understanding of what rational interaction looks like.
But I assume that for an average person on the internet, things are probably the same as before, or worse.
That is awesome if true! But I worry that maybe this is instead about your selection of the sources you read.
Maybe over the years you learned to recognize the stupid sources and reject them quickly, and also over the years you have accumulated a nice collection of smart sources. That would be a pessimistic hypothesis.
.
I also have a bounded-optimistic hypothesis, which is that only a fixed small fraction of people are rationality-compatible… but thanks to the spreading of our memes, now these people are better exposed to rationality, better exposed to each other, and more likely to blog.
In other words, I assume that the greatest improvement happened with the group of people who “have a potential to be rational, but they need a nudge to make it click”. As opposed to the past, now these people (1) have the other sources that can nudge them; and (2) if they succeed to become rational, they won’t be alone doing so.
Seems to me that in the past, there were rational individuals out there, but they were a small minority at any website. And if they made their own blogs, most commenters there would be deeply irrational. Today there is a rationalist community (and a much larger community of people who are influenced by the rationalist community even if they don’t consider themselves being a part of it), and if you start your own blog, you can attract readers from there. There is a sufficiently large group of people who share a tacit understanding of what rational interaction looks like.
But I assume that for an average person on the internet, things are probably the same as before, or worse.