...but you will disagree with me. And we are both aspiring rationalists, and therefore we resolve disagreements by experiments. I propose one.
I’m surprised you expected most of your readers to disagree. I think it’s pretty clear that the techniques we work on here aren’t making us much more successful than most people.
Humans aren’t naturally well equipped to be extreme rationalists. The techniques themselves may be correct, but that doesn’t mean we can realistically expect many people to apply them. To use the rationality-as-martial art metaphor, if you taught Shaolin kung fu to a population of fifty year old couch potatoes, they would not be able to perform most of the techniques correctly, and you should not expect to hear many true accounts of them winning fights with their skills.
Perhaps with enough work we could refine the art of human instrumental rationality into something much better than what we’ve got, maybe achieve a .3 correlation with success rather than a .1, but while a fighting style developed explicitly for 50 year old couch potatoes might give your class better results than other styles, you can only expect so much out of it.
This. If less wrong had been introduced to an audience of self-improvement health buffs and business people instead of nerdy booksmart Harry Potter fans, things would have been drastically different. it is possible to become more effective at optimizing for other goals besides just truth. People here seem to naively assume so as long as they have enough sufficiently accurate information everything else will simply fall into place and they’ll do everything else right automatically without needing to really practice or develop any other skills. I will be speaking more on this later.
I would replace “introduced” to “sold” or “made interesting” here. It’s not enough to introduce a group of people to something—unless their values are already in sync with said something’s _appearance_ (and the appearance, aka elevator pitch, aka hook, is really important here), you would need to apply some marketing/Dark Arts/rhetorics/whatever-you-call-it to persuade them it’s worth it. And, for all claims of “Rationalists should win”, Yudkowsky2008 was too much of a rhetorics-hater (really, not noticing his own pattern of having the good teachers of Defence against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts themselves practicing Dark Arts (or, in case of Lupin, *being* Dark Arts)?) to perform that marketing, and thus the blog went to attract people who already shared the values—nerdy booksmarts (note that a)to the best of my knowledge, HPMoR postdates Sequences; b)Harry Potter isn’t exactly a booksmart-choosing fandom, as is shown by many factors including the gross proportion of “watched-the-films-never-read-the-books” fans against readers AND people who imagine Draco Malfoy to be a refined aristocrat whose behavior is, though not nice, perfectly calibred instead of the petty bully we see in both books and films AND—I should stop here before I go on a tangent; so I am not certain how much “Harry Potter fans” is relevant).
I’m surprised you expected most of your readers to disagree. I think it’s pretty clear that the techniques we work on here aren’t making us much more successful than most people.
Humans aren’t naturally well equipped to be extreme rationalists. The techniques themselves may be correct, but that doesn’t mean we can realistically expect many people to apply them. To use the rationality-as-martial art metaphor, if you taught Shaolin kung fu to a population of fifty year old couch potatoes, they would not be able to perform most of the techniques correctly, and you should not expect to hear many true accounts of them winning fights with their skills.
Perhaps with enough work we could refine the art of human instrumental rationality into something much better than what we’ve got, maybe achieve a .3 correlation with success rather than a .1, but while a fighting style developed explicitly for 50 year old couch potatoes might give your class better results than other styles, you can only expect so much out of it.
This. If less wrong had been introduced to an audience of self-improvement health buffs and business people instead of nerdy booksmart Harry Potter fans, things would have been drastically different. it is possible to become more effective at optimizing for other goals besides just truth. People here seem to naively assume so as long as they have enough sufficiently accurate information everything else will simply fall into place and they’ll do everything else right automatically without needing to really practice or develop any other skills. I will be speaking more on this later.
I would replace “introduced” to “sold” or “made interesting” here. It’s not enough to introduce a group of people to something—unless their values are already in sync with said something’s _appearance_ (and the appearance, aka elevator pitch, aka hook, is really important here), you would need to apply some marketing/Dark Arts/rhetorics/whatever-you-call-it to persuade them it’s worth it. And, for all claims of “Rationalists should win”, Yudkowsky2008 was too much of a rhetorics-hater (really, not noticing his own pattern of having the good teachers of Defence against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts themselves practicing Dark Arts (or, in case of Lupin, *being* Dark Arts)?) to perform that marketing, and thus the blog went to attract people who already shared the values—nerdy booksmarts (note that a)to the best of my knowledge, HPMoR postdates Sequences; b)Harry Potter isn’t exactly a booksmart-choosing fandom, as is shown by many factors including the gross proportion of “watched-the-films-never-read-the-books” fans against readers AND people who imagine Draco Malfoy to be a refined aristocrat whose behavior is, though not nice, perfectly calibred instead of the petty bully we see in both books and films AND—I should stop here before I go on a tangent; so I am not certain how much “Harry Potter fans” is relevant).