It seems to me that the advice about Givewell has a lot of evidence behind it, but the rest of the advice doesn’t have much evidence that it gives any benefit at all, for people of average intelligence or otherwise. It would be good to have a Givewell-like project that evaluated the costs and benefits of following various rationality advice.
Heck, just having some kind of metric to see whether people were following rationality advice would be a big step forward. We can get a visceral impression that someone is more or less formidable, and we can spot patterns of repeated mistakes, but we don’t really have a good way of seeing the extent to which someone is applying rationality advice in their daily lives. (Of course this is just a restatement of the good old “Rationality Dojo” problem, one of the very first posts in the Sequences.) Paper tests don’t really capture the ability to apply the lessons to real-world problems that people actually care about.
It seems to me that the advice about Givewell has a lot of evidence behind it, but the rest of the advice doesn’t have much evidence that it gives any benefit at all, for people of average intelligence or otherwise. It would be good to have a Givewell-like project that evaluated the costs and benefits of following various rationality advice.
CFAR is kind of working along these lines.
Heck, just having some kind of metric to see whether people were following rationality advice would be a big step forward. We can get a visceral impression that someone is more or less formidable, and we can spot patterns of repeated mistakes, but we don’t really have a good way of seeing the extent to which someone is applying rationality advice in their daily lives. (Of course this is just a restatement of the good old “Rationality Dojo” problem, one of the very first posts in the Sequences.) Paper tests don’t really capture the ability to apply the lessons to real-world problems that people actually care about.