Nice typology! Let’s dive into this a little deeper.
I agree that we can’t do anything with R0.
I think many people belong to R1, but there is a huge spectrum along which they place a value on having true beliefs. At the far end of the spectrum are people like you and I, and I think most Less Wrongers, before we learned about rationality—we already cared a lot about having true beliefs. For us, giving us the Sequences, and connecting with the rationalist community, was sufficient. We can call people like that R1.999, to indicate that maybe 1 out of a 1000 people is like that. That’s a rough Fermi Estimate, and I may be optimistic (I have a personal optimism bias issue), but let’s go with that for the sake of the discussion.
Now what about the people who range from R1.001 to R1.998? This is the whole point of the Intentional Insights project—how do we move these people further up the sanity waterline spectrum? The challenge is that these people’s emotional intuitions do not line up with truth-seeking. So to get them into rational thinking, we need to increase their positive emotions around rational thinking, decrease their negative emotions about letting go of their current beliefs, and even before that bring rationality to their attention.
To do so, we at InIn do several things:
1) Increase the emotional intuitive valuation they place on rational thinking. To do so, here are active steps we are taking: making engaging videos and blogs that say “yay rational thinking, you should have warm fuzzies around it and value it emotionally to reach your own goals.”
2) Decrease the negative emotions they have around letting go of their past beliefs. That’s been a challenge, and one of the reasons I wrote this discussion post. I listed above some things that worked for us. We also write blogs highlighting people’s personal stories about updating their beliefs, to make this appear more doable and cognitively easy.
3) Getting this information to people’s attention. The way we do this is through out website, through collaborating with a wide variety of reason-oriented groups, and through publishing articles and doing interviews in prominent media venues.
So those encompass the what I think it takes to move R1 to R2. I also agree about the dangers of R3, which is why it’s important to get people into a community with more advanced rationalists, otherwise they might just remain half a rationalist.
Nice typology! Let’s dive into this a little deeper.
I agree that we can’t do anything with R0.
I think many people belong to R1, but there is a huge spectrum along which they place a value on having true beliefs. At the far end of the spectrum are people like you and I, and I think most Less Wrongers, before we learned about rationality—we already cared a lot about having true beliefs. For us, giving us the Sequences, and connecting with the rationalist community, was sufficient. We can call people like that R1.999, to indicate that maybe 1 out of a 1000 people is like that. That’s a rough Fermi Estimate, and I may be optimistic (I have a personal optimism bias issue), but let’s go with that for the sake of the discussion.
Now what about the people who range from R1.001 to R1.998? This is the whole point of the Intentional Insights project—how do we move these people further up the sanity waterline spectrum? The challenge is that these people’s emotional intuitions do not line up with truth-seeking. So to get them into rational thinking, we need to increase their positive emotions around rational thinking, decrease their negative emotions about letting go of their current beliefs, and even before that bring rationality to their attention.
To do so, we at InIn do several things:
1) Increase the emotional intuitive valuation they place on rational thinking. To do so, here are active steps we are taking: making engaging videos and blogs that say “yay rational thinking, you should have warm fuzzies around it and value it emotionally to reach your own goals.”
2) Decrease the negative emotions they have around letting go of their past beliefs. That’s been a challenge, and one of the reasons I wrote this discussion post. I listed above some things that worked for us. We also write blogs highlighting people’s personal stories about updating their beliefs, to make this appear more doable and cognitively easy.
3) Getting this information to people’s attention. The way we do this is through out website, through collaborating with a wide variety of reason-oriented groups, and through publishing articles and doing interviews in prominent media venues.
So those encompass the what I think it takes to move R1 to R2. I also agree about the dangers of R3, which is why it’s important to get people into a community with more advanced rationalists, otherwise they might just remain half a rationalist.