Second, the example of dieting comes to mind when I think of training rationality. While they’re not much connected to the rationality community, they are a large group of people focused on overcoming one particular aspect of our irrationallity. (but without much success)
Yeah, Lesswrong sometimes feels a bit like a forum for a fad diet that has a compelling story for why it might work and seemed to have greatly helped a few people anecdotally, so the forum filled up with people excited about it, but it doesn’t seem to actually work for most of them. Yet they keep coming back because their friends are on the forum now and because they don’t want to admit failure.
First off, Scott’s blog is awesome.
Second, the example of dieting comes to mind when I think of training rationality. While they’re not much connected to the rationality community, they are a large group of people focused on overcoming one particular aspect of our irrationallity. (but without much success)
Yeah, Lesswrong sometimes feels a bit like a forum for a fad diet that has a compelling story for why it might work and seemed to have greatly helped a few people anecdotally, so the forum filled up with people excited about it, but it doesn’t seem to actually work for most of them. Yet they keep coming back because their friends are on the forum now and because they don’t want to admit failure.