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.
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.