Awesome is probably bad news, because it means the “great filter” of rationality is still far ahead of us.
If we imagine General Semantics as a Rationality Movement 1.0 and LessWrong/CFAR as a Rationality Movement 2.0, the outside view seems to suggest that even after we publish a successful and influential book, create an organization, inspire dozens of famous people, and create easy-to-use textbooks for elementary schools and kindergartens… still the most likely outcome is that half a century later someone will dig in history to find our remains and say “oh, shiny!”.
Yes and no. I think lots of advanced stuff (for a suitable def. of ‘advanced’) will just not be ‘common knowledge’ for multiple generations until it ‘fixates’.
Most movements fail. Most ideas die before they get momentum. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ideas were bad, just that they had bad luck or the circumstances around them weren’t just right.
Awesome is probably bad news, because it means the “great filter” of rationality is still far ahead of us.
If we imagine General Semantics as a Rationality Movement 1.0 and LessWrong/CFAR as a Rationality Movement 2.0, the outside view seems to suggest that even after we publish a successful and influential book, create an organization, inspire dozens of famous people, and create easy-to-use textbooks for elementary schools and kindergartens… still the most likely outcome is that half a century later someone will dig in history to find our remains and say “oh, shiny!”.
Yes and no. I think lots of advanced stuff (for a suitable def. of ‘advanced’) will just not be ‘common knowledge’ for multiple generations until it ‘fixates’.
Most movements fail. Most ideas die before they get momentum. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ideas were bad, just that they had bad luck or the circumstances around them weren’t just right.