Every dojo has its sensei. There is a need for curriculum, but also skilled teachers to guide the earnest student. LessWrong and Overcoming Bias have, to some extent, been the dojo in which the students train. I think that you may find a lot of value in just jumping into a project like this: starting a small school that meets two times a week to practice a particular skill of rationality. A key goal to the budding school is to train the future’s teachers.
One of my barriers to improving my rationality is little awareness of what the good reading and study material is. A curriculum of reading material—rationalist homework—would help me greatly. Furthermore, I have no friends that are similarly interested in the subject to bounce ideas off of or “train” with.
I train Jiu-Jitsu with several friends. We learn the same lessons, but learn at different rates. We discover different insights and share them. We practice techniques on each other and on opponents more and less skilled than ourselves. This dynamic is something rationalist dojos could benefit from.
Edit, Additional Comments:
The sense that a particular skill should be systematized and trained comes, in part, from the realization that the training conveys a measurable formidability. Problem #1 and Problem #2, then, are entangled: without a way to validate training, one can not say “I have defeated my opponent because of my training” and it is the ability to demonstrate mastery that motivates others to become students.
Many readers of this site and Overcoming Bias are here because of the demonstration of budding formidability found in the insights in OB posts. We read insights and learn techniques—sloppily, like learning to wrestle from a mail order program—and we want to be able to produce similar insights and be similarly formidable.
And conversely they don’t look at the lack of visibly greater formidability, and say, “We must be doing something wrong.”
Is the “lack of visibly greater formidability” actually visible? The wandering master sees the local students’ deficiencies that the students are blind to. It is only when those students’ established leader is defeated by the wandering master that the greater formidability becomes apparent. Where is rationality’s flying guillotine?
More precisely, what is rationality’s method for scoring matches? If you don’t have that, you have no way to know whether the flying guillotine is any good, or whether you’re even getting better at what you’re doing within your own school.
To me, the score worth caring about most, is how many of your own irrational beliefs, biases, conditioned responses, etc., you can identify and root out… using verifiable criteria for their removal… as opposed to simply being able to tell that it would be a good idea to think differently about something. (Which is why I consider Eliezer “formidable”, as opposed to merely “smart”: his writing shows evidence of having done a fair amount of this kind of work.)
Unfortunately, this sort of measurement is no good for scoring matches, unless the participants set out to prove at the beginning that they were more wrong than their opponent, at the beginning of the “match”!
But then, neither is any other sort of competitive measurement any good, as far I can see. If you use popularity, then you are subject to rhetorical effects, apparent intelligence, status, and other biasing factors. If you use some sort of reality-based contest, the result needn’t necessarily correlate with rationality or thinking skills in general. And if you present a puzzle to be solved, how will you judge the solution, unless you’re at least as “formidable” as the competitors?
Every dojo has its sensei. There is a need for curriculum, but also skilled teachers to guide the earnest student. LessWrong and Overcoming Bias have, to some extent, been the dojo in which the students train. I think that you may find a lot of value in just jumping into a project like this: starting a small school that meets two times a week to practice a particular skill of rationality. A key goal to the budding school is to train the future’s teachers.
One of my barriers to improving my rationality is little awareness of what the good reading and study material is. A curriculum of reading material—rationalist homework—would help me greatly. Furthermore, I have no friends that are similarly interested in the subject to bounce ideas off of or “train” with.
I train Jiu-Jitsu with several friends. We learn the same lessons, but learn at different rates. We discover different insights and share them. We practice techniques on each other and on opponents more and less skilled than ourselves. This dynamic is something rationalist dojos could benefit from.
Edit, Additional Comments:
The sense that a particular skill should be systematized and trained comes, in part, from the realization that the training conveys a measurable formidability. Problem #1 and Problem #2, then, are entangled: without a way to validate training, one can not say “I have defeated my opponent because of my training” and it is the ability to demonstrate mastery that motivates others to become students.
Many readers of this site and Overcoming Bias are here because of the demonstration of budding formidability found in the insights in OB posts. We read insights and learn techniques—sloppily, like learning to wrestle from a mail order program—and we want to be able to produce similar insights and be similarly formidable.
Is the “lack of visibly greater formidability” actually visible? The wandering master sees the local students’ deficiencies that the students are blind to. It is only when those students’ established leader is defeated by the wandering master that the greater formidability becomes apparent. Where is rationality’s flying guillotine?
More precisely, what is rationality’s method for scoring matches? If you don’t have that, you have no way to know whether the flying guillotine is any good, or whether you’re even getting better at what you’re doing within your own school.
To me, the score worth caring about most, is how many of your own irrational beliefs, biases, conditioned responses, etc., you can identify and root out… using verifiable criteria for their removal… as opposed to simply being able to tell that it would be a good idea to think differently about something. (Which is why I consider Eliezer “formidable”, as opposed to merely “smart”: his writing shows evidence of having done a fair amount of this kind of work.)
Unfortunately, this sort of measurement is no good for scoring matches, unless the participants set out to prove at the beginning that they were more wrong than their opponent, at the beginning of the “match”!
But then, neither is any other sort of competitive measurement any good, as far I can see. If you use popularity, then you are subject to rhetorical effects, apparent intelligence, status, and other biasing factors. If you use some sort of reality-based contest, the result needn’t necessarily correlate with rationality or thinking skills in general. And if you present a puzzle to be solved, how will you judge the solution, unless you’re at least as “formidable” as the competitors?
Any system of measurement is subject to Goodhart’s Law. This is really rough when you’re trying to engage with reality.