The point is to win, isn’t it? You can win with a long sword or you can win with a short sword. And to carry the analogy further, it doesn’t much matter what you’ve been stabbed with; you’ll still bleed.
Also, don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers? You definitely won’t get any normal people to get into the rationality tent if you refer to them as “IQ 100s” for pretty obvious reasons. One of the growth factors you didn’t mention is an atmosphere of acceptance once inside the ingroup, rather than the adversarial atmosphere of LW.
I wasn’t trying to make a complete list of growth factors. I was making a list of advantages yielded by the “prompt identity claim, only then introduce details of doctrine, if at all” order of operations. An atmosphere of acceptance has no direct relationship to that habit and it’s something we could adopt comparatively unproblematically. I have no idea what your stabbing analogy is supposed to get at.
They’re correlated; if your membership test is much more complicated than identity, you’ll get people that curry favor by calling out others for not being true believers. (This is the case in cults, but not so much in mainstream religions.)
Whatever the point is of the nascent social movement MIRI and affiliates are trying to launch, presumably the people executing it want to be successful. If lowered barriers to identification causes rationality to win, I’m not sure I care if that ordering matters.
To rephrase, would you rather live in a world where the only people who were signed up for cryonics were the less than one percent of the population who could both afford to, and had been convinced of the merits of cryonics on purely logical grounds; or in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics from birth, as a standard part of medical care, because that’s what people who identified as Rationalists did and they didn’t think very much about it?
The latter world may have “missed the point,” but people are dying in the former world. Once you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter how you got there; conversely, it seems a little petty to refuse to use any tool you can to fight it.
Perhaps there should be two levels of membership. Membership in the outer group would only require people to accept the identity; and there would be a social pressure to do the rituals recommended by the inner group. Membership in the inner group would require hard work and proving one’s rationality by successfully completing some tests.
As usual, the religion already has it. The outer group is called “believers” and the inner group is called “priests”.
In a hypothetical world ruled by rationalists, the priests would do the rationality training and try to be as free of bias as possible, and the believers would be advised to sign up for cryonics.
I feel rather like you’re patronizing me; please take that as rebuke if you are and an attempt at helpful feedback on composing your communiques if you are not.
I would rather decouple cryonics from rationalism enough that it could be a standard practice without having to win over the population with an identity claim. Even if the identity claim → doctrine order of operations helps, that doesn’t make it foolproof, or whichever religion figured it out first would be universal by now.
Well, the secrets cults are dead, and the three religions that figured that out first in their respective regions captured pretty much the entire market to the point where there’s a stalemate. People tend to have ideas at around the same time, and ideas spread slower back then, but the religions of modernity are universal for precisely that reason.
don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if you mean ”… that there isn’t a large difference between the IQs of LW readers and those of the general population” then no, the surveys appear to show the exact opposite: so far as one can tell from these surveys, the LW population appears to be something like 3 standard deviations above average.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is perfectly consistent with its being a really bad idea to be dismissive about people with average IQs—though as it happens I don’t think Alicorn actually was, and in particular she didn’t refer to anyone as “IQ 100s”.
The point is to win, isn’t it? You can win with a long sword or you can win with a short sword. And to carry the analogy further, it doesn’t much matter what you’ve been stabbed with; you’ll still bleed.
Also, don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers? You definitely won’t get any normal people to get into the rationality tent if you refer to them as “IQ 100s” for pretty obvious reasons. One of the growth factors you didn’t mention is an atmosphere of acceptance once inside the ingroup, rather than the adversarial atmosphere of LW.
I wasn’t trying to make a complete list of growth factors. I was making a list of advantages yielded by the “prompt identity claim, only then introduce details of doctrine, if at all” order of operations. An atmosphere of acceptance has no direct relationship to that habit and it’s something we could adopt comparatively unproblematically. I have no idea what your stabbing analogy is supposed to get at.
They’re correlated; if your membership test is much more complicated than identity, you’ll get people that curry favor by calling out others for not being true believers. (This is the case in cults, but not so much in mainstream religions.)
Whatever the point is of the nascent social movement MIRI and affiliates are trying to launch, presumably the people executing it want to be successful. If lowered barriers to identification causes rationality to win, I’m not sure I care if that ordering matters.
To rephrase, would you rather live in a world where the only people who were signed up for cryonics were the less than one percent of the population who could both afford to, and had been convinced of the merits of cryonics on purely logical grounds; or in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics from birth, as a standard part of medical care, because that’s what people who identified as Rationalists did and they didn’t think very much about it?
The latter world may have “missed the point,” but people are dying in the former world. Once you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter how you got there; conversely, it seems a little petty to refuse to use any tool you can to fight it.
Perhaps there should be two levels of membership. Membership in the outer group would only require people to accept the identity; and there would be a social pressure to do the rituals recommended by the inner group. Membership in the inner group would require hard work and proving one’s rationality by successfully completing some tests.
As usual, the religion already has it. The outer group is called “believers” and the inner group is called “priests”.
In a hypothetical world ruled by rationalists, the priests would do the rationality training and try to be as free of bias as possible, and the believers would be advised to sign up for cryonics.
I feel rather like you’re patronizing me; please take that as rebuke if you are and an attempt at helpful feedback on composing your communiques if you are not.
I would rather decouple cryonics from rationalism enough that it could be a standard practice without having to win over the population with an identity claim. Even if the identity claim → doctrine order of operations helps, that doesn’t make it foolproof, or whichever religion figured it out first would be universal by now.
Well, the secrets cults are dead, and the three religions that figured that out first in their respective regions captured pretty much the entire market to the point where there’s a stalemate. People tend to have ideas at around the same time, and ideas spread slower back then, but the religions of modernity are universal for precisely that reason.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if you mean ”… that there isn’t a large difference between the IQs of LW readers and those of the general population” then no, the surveys appear to show the exact opposite: so far as one can tell from these surveys, the LW population appears to be something like 3 standard deviations above average.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is perfectly consistent with its being a really bad idea to be dismissive about people with average IQs—though as it happens I don’t think Alicorn actually was, and in particular she didn’t refer to anyone as “IQ 100s”.