This site often speaks of rationality and intelligence as though they were the same thing, and that someone, by becoming more rational, becomes more intelligent for practical purposes.
Certainly it seems to me that this must be to some extent the case, but what is the exchange rate? If a person has an IQ of 100, and then they spend a year on lesswrong, reading all the sequences and taking the advice to heart, training their skills and identifying their biases and all that, at the end of it, presumably their raw IQ score is still 100, but if we measure how they do on correlated indicators regarding their lifestyle or something, should we expect to see them, in some way, living the life of a smarter person? How much smarter?
How many points of IQ would you be willing to give up to retain what you have learned from this site?
Personally I would answer “less than one”. It seems like it SHOULD be useful, but it doesn’t really feel like it is.
Rationality vs. intelligence
This site often speaks of rationality and intelligence as though they were the same thing, and that someone, by becoming more rational, becomes more intelligent for practical purposes.
Certainly it seems to me that this must be to some extent the case, but what is the exchange rate? If a person has an IQ of 100, and then they spend a year on lesswrong, reading all the sequences and taking the advice to heart, training their skills and identifying their biases and all that, at the end of it, presumably their raw IQ score is still 100, but if we measure how they do on correlated indicators regarding their lifestyle or something, should we expect to see them, in some way, living the life of a smarter person? How much smarter?
How many points of IQ would you be willing to give up to retain what you have learned from this site?
Personally I would answer “less than one”. It seems like it SHOULD be useful, but it doesn’t really feel like it is.