What you less wrong folks call “rationality” is not what everyone else calls “rationality”—you can’t say “I also think that rationality is doing a great job in helping people”, that either doesn’t make sense or is a tautology, depending on your interpretation. Please stop saying “rationality” and meaning your own in-group thing, it’s ridiculously offputting.
Also, my experience has been that CFAR-trained folks do sit down and do hard things, and that people who are only familiar with LW just don’t. It has also been my experience that they don’t do enough hard things to just “win”, in the sense defined here, and that the difference between “winning” and not is actually not easily exploitable with slightly more intelligent macro-scale behavior. The branching points that differentiate between the winning and losing paths are the exploitable points—things like deciding whether or not to go to college, or whether to switch jobs—and they’re alright at choosing between those, but so are other people. CFAR-trained folks are typically reasonably better than equivalently intelligent folks who have had the same experience so far, but not dramatically so.
What you less wrong folks call “rationality” is not what everyone else calls “rationality”—you can’t say “I also think that rationality is doing a great job in helping people”, that either doesn’t make sense or is a tautology, depending on your interpretation. Please stop saying “rationality” and meaning your own in-group thing, it’s ridiculously offputting.
Also, my experience has been that CFAR-trained folks do sit down and do hard things, and that people who are only familiar with LW just don’t. It has also been my experience that they don’t do enough hard things to just “win”, in the sense defined here, and that the difference between “winning” and not is actually not easily exploitable with slightly more intelligent macro-scale behavior. The branching points that differentiate between the winning and losing paths are the exploitable points—things like deciding whether or not to go to college, or whether to switch jobs—and they’re alright at choosing between those, but so are other people. CFAR-trained folks are typically reasonably better than equivalently intelligent folks who have had the same experience so far, but not dramatically so.
He may have meant that he thinks rationality is effective for altruists.