I can’t see any good general solutions. People are limited to their own judgement about whether something which purports to be selling rationality actually makes sense.
You take your chances with whether martial arts and yoga classes are useful and safe.
LW et al. does have first mover advantage and hopefully some prestige as a result, and I’m hoping that that resources for the general public will be developed here. On the other hand, taking sufficient care to develop workshops which actually work takes time—and that’s workshops for people whose intelligence level is similar to that of the people putting on the workshops.
If we assume that rationalists should win, even over fake rationalists, then maybe we should leave the possibility open that rationalists who are actually in the situation of competing with fake rationalists should be in a better position to find solutions because they’ll know more than we do now.
I also don’t have a solution besides reminding the rationalists that we run on corrupted hardware, and the strong feeling of “these people around me are idiots, I could do it hundred times better” is an evolutionary adaptation for situations when there are many resources and no significant external enemy. (And by the way, this could explain a lot of individualism our society has these days.) We had a few people here who got offended e.g. by Eliezer’s certainty about quantum physics, and tried to split, and failed.
So perhaps the risk is actually small. Fake rationalists may be prone to self-sabotage. The proverbial valley of the bad rationality surrounding the castle of rationality can make being a half-rationalist even worse than being a non-rationalist. So the rationalists may have a hard time fighting pure superstition, but the half-rationalists will just conveniently destroy themselves.
The first mover advantage works best if all players are using the same strategy. But sometimes the new player can learn from older players’ mistakes, and does not have to pay the costs. (Google wasn’t the first search engine; Facebook wasn’t the first social network; MS Windows wasn’t the first operating system with graphical interface.) The second player could learn from LW’s bad PR. But it is likely that being completely irrational would be even more profitable for them, if profit would be the main goal.
I can’t see any good general solutions. People are limited to their own judgement about whether something which purports to be selling rationality actually makes sense.
You take your chances with whether martial arts and yoga classes are useful and safe.
LW et al. does have first mover advantage and hopefully some prestige as a result, and I’m hoping that that resources for the general public will be developed here. On the other hand, taking sufficient care to develop workshops which actually work takes time—and that’s workshops for people whose intelligence level is similar to that of the people putting on the workshops.
If we assume that rationalists should win, even over fake rationalists, then maybe we should leave the possibility open that rationalists who are actually in the situation of competing with fake rationalists should be in a better position to find solutions because they’ll know more than we do now.
I also don’t have a solution besides reminding the rationalists that we run on corrupted hardware, and the strong feeling of “these people around me are idiots, I could do it hundred times better” is an evolutionary adaptation for situations when there are many resources and no significant external enemy. (And by the way, this could explain a lot of individualism our society has these days.) We had a few people here who got offended e.g. by Eliezer’s certainty about quantum physics, and tried to split, and failed.
So perhaps the risk is actually small. Fake rationalists may be prone to self-sabotage. The proverbial valley of the bad rationality surrounding the castle of rationality can make being a half-rationalist even worse than being a non-rationalist. So the rationalists may have a hard time fighting pure superstition, but the half-rationalists will just conveniently destroy themselves.
The first mover advantage works best if all players are using the same strategy. But sometimes the new player can learn from older players’ mistakes, and does not have to pay the costs. (Google wasn’t the first search engine; Facebook wasn’t the first social network; MS Windows wasn’t the first operating system with graphical interface.) The second player could learn from LW’s bad PR. But it is likely that being completely irrational would be even more profitable for them, if profit would be the main goal.