Hmm, when there is a disagreement somewhere, it is worth going back to first principles, isn’t it?
If I remember correctly, Eliezer’s motivations for starting the whole series of posts back on overcoming bias was “raising the sanity waterline” or something like that. Basically, realizing that you are an imperfect reasoner and striving to see your reasoning flaws and do better. This is an uphill battle, humans did not evolve to reason well at all, and different people have different classes of flaws, some are too combative, some are too accepting, the list is long and well documented all over the internet. Because not everyone fails to be “rational” in the same way, different techniques work better, depending on the person, and teaching an unsuitable “rationalist” technique can actually make the person “less rational”. Scott Alexander alluded to it in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/.
I suspect that the standard rationalist lore and curriculum is aimed at specific audience, and your argument is that it does not work for a different audience.
Hmm, when there is a disagreement somewhere, it is worth going back to first principles, isn’t it?
If I remember correctly, Eliezer’s motivations for starting the whole series of posts back on overcoming bias was “raising the sanity waterline” or something like that. Basically, realizing that you are an imperfect reasoner and striving to see your reasoning flaws and do better. This is an uphill battle, humans did not evolve to reason well at all, and different people have different classes of flaws, some are too combative, some are too accepting, the list is long and well documented all over the internet. Because not everyone fails to be “rational” in the same way, different techniques work better, depending on the person, and teaching an unsuitable “rationalist” technique can actually make the person “less rational”. Scott Alexander alluded to it in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/.
I suspect that the standard rationalist lore and curriculum is aimed at specific audience, and your argument is that it does not work for a different audience.