I agree that people say such things all the time. What I haven’t seen very much is
People questioning whether they themselves are subject to this influence (as opposed to questioning whether other people are subject to this influence).
Meta-level discussion about how to counteract this influence.
On the latter point, I find certain principles from your How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence to be highly relevant and significant, but I don’t remember having seen explicit application of these principles to “assessing the relative social impact of different effective altruism interventions” in the public domain.
I wrote a post which is related, except that I thought different people might be more or less influenced by different biases and didn’t identify one in particular as the most relevant.
It’s obvious to people in the rationality community (I’d agree with Jonah that even here, we don’t do a good enough job of actually instilling habits. )
But the Effective Altruism community is in the process of going… not mainstream, exactly, but at least drawing from different pools of people than the rationality community. Some of those people are coming from places like felicifia.org, which has a fair emphasis of intellectual rigor, but a lot of those people are coming from circles where a lot of ideas we take for granted aren’t really common. Over the past few months, there’s been an influx of people into the facebook group discussions and I’ve been a lot more concerned about careful thinking.
I’ve been noticing similar issues promoting the NYC Less Wrong group outside of LW-itself lately. On LW there’s a shared culture of taking responsibility for your own intellectual rigor, or at the very least, acknowledging when you haven’t researched an idea enough to be confident in it. Figuring out how to instill this in newcomers seems pretty important.
Seems kind of obvious? We’ve got plenty of people running around saying “Perhaps you overestimate your importance”.
I agree that people say such things all the time. What I haven’t seen very much is
People questioning whether they themselves are subject to this influence (as opposed to questioning whether other people are subject to this influence).
Meta-level discussion about how to counteract this influence.
On the latter point, I find certain principles from your How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence to be highly relevant and significant, but I don’t remember having seen explicit application of these principles to “assessing the relative social impact of different effective altruism interventions” in the public domain.
I wrote a post which is related, except that I thought different people might be more or less influenced by different biases and didn’t identify one in particular as the most relevant.
Yes, I vaguely remember having seen this — good point.
It’s obvious to people in the rationality community (I’d agree with Jonah that even here, we don’t do a good enough job of actually instilling habits. )
But the Effective Altruism community is in the process of going… not mainstream, exactly, but at least drawing from different pools of people than the rationality community. Some of those people are coming from places like felicifia.org, which has a fair emphasis of intellectual rigor, but a lot of those people are coming from circles where a lot of ideas we take for granted aren’t really common. Over the past few months, there’s been an influx of people into the facebook group discussions and I’ve been a lot more concerned about careful thinking.
I’ve been noticing similar issues promoting the NYC Less Wrong group outside of LW-itself lately. On LW there’s a shared culture of taking responsibility for your own intellectual rigor, or at the very least, acknowledging when you haven’t researched an idea enough to be confident in it. Figuring out how to instill this in newcomers seems pretty important.