In the spirit of concrete reductions, I have a question for everyone here:
Let’s say we took a random but very large sample of students from prestigious colleges, split them into two groups, and made Group A take a year-long class based on Overcoming Bias, in which students read the posts and then (intelligent, engaging) professors explained anything the students didn’t understand. Wherever a specific technique was mentioned, students were asked to try that technique as homework.
Group B took a placebo statistics class similar to every other college statistics class, also with intelligent and engaging professors.
Twenty-five years later, how would you expect the salaries of students in Group A to compare to the salaries of students in Group B? The same? 1.1 times greater? Twice as great? What about self-reported happiness? Amount of money donated to charity per year?
Does the course use CBT-like techniques, where e.g. when “Leave a line of retreat” is taught, participants specifically list out all the possibilities where fear might be preventing them from thinking carefully, and build themselves lines of retreat for those possibilities? And learn cached heuristics for noticing, through the rest of their lives, when leaving a line of retreat would be a good idea, together with habits for actually doing so? Also, does the course have a community spirit, with peers asking one another how things went, and pushing one another to experiment and implement?
If so, I’d give 50% odds (for each separate proposition, not the conjunction) that the group A salaries are higher variance than the group B’s, and that the 98th percentile wealthiest / most famous / most impactful of group A is significantly wealthier / more famous / more successful at improving their chosen fields than the 98th percentile of group B. Significantly, like… times five, say (though I’d expect a larger multiplier from the “changing their chosen fields to work well” than from the “making more money”; strategicness is more rarely applied to the former, and there’s lower hanging fruit). (I would not expect such a gap between the two groups’ medians.)
I would expect very little correlation with salaries. And about self-reported happiness—I often think that knowing about all biases, memory imperfections and all that stuff, and about how difficult it is to decide correctly, makes me substantially less happy.
prase, is happiness much of a goal for you? If so, have you tried to apply rationality toward it, e.g. by reading the academic research on happiness (Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” is a nice summary) and thinking through what might work for you?
In the spirit of concrete reductions, I have a question for everyone here:
Let’s say we took a random but very large sample of students from prestigious colleges, split them into two groups, and made Group A take a year-long class based on Overcoming Bias, in which students read the posts and then (intelligent, engaging) professors explained anything the students didn’t understand. Wherever a specific technique was mentioned, students were asked to try that technique as homework.
Group B took a placebo statistics class similar to every other college statistics class, also with intelligent and engaging professors.
Twenty-five years later, how would you expect the salaries of students in Group A to compare to the salaries of students in Group B? The same? 1.1 times greater? Twice as great? What about self-reported happiness? Amount of money donated to charity per year?
Does the course use CBT-like techniques, where e.g. when “Leave a line of retreat” is taught, participants specifically list out all the possibilities where fear might be preventing them from thinking carefully, and build themselves lines of retreat for those possibilities? And learn cached heuristics for noticing, through the rest of their lives, when leaving a line of retreat would be a good idea, together with habits for actually doing so? Also, does the course have a community spirit, with peers asking one another how things went, and pushing one another to experiment and implement?
If so, I’d give 50% odds (for each separate proposition, not the conjunction) that the group A salaries are higher variance than the group B’s, and that the 98th percentile wealthiest / most famous / most impactful of group A is significantly wealthier / more famous / more successful at improving their chosen fields than the 98th percentile of group B. Significantly, like… times five, say (though I’d expect a larger multiplier from the “changing their chosen fields to work well” than from the “making more money”; strategicness is more rarely applied to the former, and there’s lower hanging fruit). (I would not expect such a gap between the two groups’ medians.)
I would expect very little correlation with salaries. And about self-reported happiness—I often think that knowing about all biases, memory imperfections and all that stuff, and about how difficult it is to decide correctly, makes me substantially less happy.
prase, is happiness much of a goal for you? If so, have you tried to apply rationality toward it, e.g. by reading the academic research on happiness (Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” is a nice summary) and thinking through what might work for you?