This was a great post that might have changed my worldview some.
Some highlights:
1.
People’s rationality is much more defined by their ability to maneuver themselves into environments in which their external incentives align with their goals, than by their ability to have correct opinions while being subject to incentives they don’t endorse. This is a tractable intervention and so the best people will be able to have vastly more accurate beliefs than the average person, but it means that “having accurate beliefs in one domain” doesn’t straightforwardly generalize to “will have accurate beliefs in other domains”.
I’ve heard people say things like this in the past, but haven’t really taken it seriously as an important component of my rationality practice. Somehow what you say here is compelling to me (maybe because I recently noticed a major place where my thinking was majorly constrained by my social ties and social standing) and it prodded me to think about how to build “mech suits” that not only increase my power but incentives my rationality. I now have a todo item to “think about principles for incentivizing true beliefs, in team design.”
2.
I think a generally better setup is to choose a much smaller group of people that you trust to evaluate your actions very closely,
Similarly, thinking explicitly about which groups I want to be accountable to sounds like a really good idea.
I had been going through the world keeping this Paul Graham quote in mind...
I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn’t start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven’t had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
...choosing good friends, and and doing things that would impress them.
But what you’re pointing at here seems like a slightly different thing. Which people do I want to make myself transparent to, so that they can judge if I’m living up to my values.
This also gave me an idea for a CFAR style program: a reassess your life workshop, in which a small number of people come together for a period of 3 days or so, and reevaluate cached decisions. We start by making lines of retreat (with mentor assistance), and then look at high impact questions in our life: given new info, does your current job / community / relationship / life-style choice / other still make sense?
This was a great post that might have changed my worldview some.
Some highlights:
1.
I’ve heard people say things like this in the past, but haven’t really taken it seriously as an important component of my rationality practice. Somehow what you say here is compelling to me (maybe because I recently noticed a major place where my thinking was majorly constrained by my social ties and social standing) and it prodded me to think about how to build “mech suits” that not only increase my power but incentives my rationality. I now have a todo item to “think about principles for incentivizing true beliefs, in team design.”
2.
Similarly, thinking explicitly about which groups I want to be accountable to sounds like a really good idea.
I had been going through the world keeping this Paul Graham quote in mind...
...choosing good friends, and and doing things that would impress them.
But what you’re pointing at here seems like a slightly different thing. Which people do I want to make myself transparent to, so that they can judge if I’m living up to my values.
This also gave me an idea for a CFAR style program: a reassess your life workshop, in which a small number of people come together for a period of 3 days or so, and reevaluate cached decisions. We start by making lines of retreat (with mentor assistance), and then look at high impact questions in our life: given new info, does your current job / community / relationship / life-style choice / other still make sense?
Thanks for writing.