After thinking about your reply for a while, you’ve made me update strongly towards believing that I had overestimated my own efficacy. In particular:
I’ve been reading LW for about five years and “knew” about most of these tools abstractly without ever getting anything practical out of it. You can check the comments to Hammers and Nailsand extrapolate that even longtime LWers have each only practiced only 5% of all the techniques we have, and that 5% varies wildly from person to person. It’s not clear if what I’ve written so far actually helps in this direction, but I think a properly written sequence will actually inject readers with the moral fire to do the thing that they’ve known about for years.
This struck me as I hadn’t considered that I was missing so many tools. I feel like I’ve had my life improved a lot by rationality. I can cite many many cases where things get resolved specifically because I have the proper information and training. Yet even with everything I currently do, I now realize that I don’t impliment the vast majority of useful things we as a community have managed to come up with. If one of your primary goals with this series it to imbue people with some of that “moral fire”, then consider it a success, at least regarding my personal experience. One thing to note is that while the series itself sets the context for this sort of thing to happen. It was only the meta-level conversation, and that specific information about inadequacy that helped me viscerally update. That might be series-relevant information.
Anyway, thanks for helping me fix my models and pointing out a glaring blind-spot.
At the beginning of this project I said to myself that I would be happy if it moved one other person in a signficant way. Right now, I’m very happy =).
I’ll try to inject more of this moral fire into the coming cycles. One thing that I’ve come to understand is that people really don’t aim high enough. There’s a mindset where you try to self-improve until you reach a satisfactory level, something like 90th percentile among the peer group, and relax there. There’s an alternative mindset where you believe that the better you are, the quicker you will improve by learning new tools, since each of them is a force multiplier. If you follow this mindset far enough, it’s almost dizzying.
After thinking about your reply for a while, you’ve made me update strongly towards believing that I had overestimated my own efficacy. In particular:
This struck me as I hadn’t considered that I was missing so many tools. I feel like I’ve had my life improved a lot by rationality. I can cite many many cases where things get resolved specifically because I have the proper information and training. Yet even with everything I currently do, I now realize that I don’t impliment the vast majority of useful things we as a community have managed to come up with. If one of your primary goals with this series it to imbue people with some of that “moral fire”, then consider it a success, at least regarding my personal experience. One thing to note is that while the series itself sets the context for this sort of thing to happen. It was only the meta-level conversation, and that specific information about inadequacy that helped me viscerally update. That might be series-relevant information.
Anyway, thanks for helping me fix my models and pointing out a glaring blind-spot.
At the beginning of this project I said to myself that I would be happy if it moved one other person in a signficant way. Right now, I’m very happy =).
I’ll try to inject more of this moral fire into the coming cycles. One thing that I’ve come to understand is that people really don’t aim high enough. There’s a mindset where you try to self-improve until you reach a satisfactory level, something like 90th percentile among the peer group, and relax there. There’s an alternative mindset where you believe that the better you are, the quicker you will improve by learning new tools, since each of them is a force multiplier. If you follow this mindset far enough, it’s almost dizzying.