This is an awesome and heart-warming question. Tsuyoku naritai!
In Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset, she talks about how attitude is usually more important than knowledge.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
It sounds like you have a great attitude. I suspect that you’re a much better rationalist than you claim to be.
Some thoughts on your original question:
Where do you live? There’s actually tons of meetups outside of the Bay Area. Check out the community page.
If there isn’t a meetup near you, hey, maybe you can start one!
There’s also various online groups that you can join. Slack, Discord, etc.
I hear that The Guild of the Rose is pretty cool and leans more towards pragmatic, real-life improvement types of things. I haven’t done it myself but I get the sense that you’d like it a lot.
You might like Beeminder. You also might enjoy discussing self improvement on their forum.
Well, if you want the complicated answer: four or five years ago, about when I started lurking here, I came with a good mindset, and intent on learning skills rather than rules, for precisely the reason you mention. That was right before I entered university, and I think I screwed up that bit. Got depressed, and have remained too out of it to actually use rationality to improve my life much since then. But that’s changing, and the first step is to pick up my rationality practice where I left it four years ago, when I started focusing only on reading blog posts to forget them soon afterward.
In other words: yeah, I know that ‘valley of bad rationality’ thing. Just digging myself out of one as we speak, actually.
And, apart from that, thanks for the great advice. Will heed it :-)
This is an awesome and heart-warming question. Tsuyoku naritai!
In Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset, she talks about how attitude is usually more important than knowledge.
It sounds like you have a great attitude. I suspect that you’re a much better rationalist than you claim to be.
Some thoughts on your original question:
Where do you live? There’s actually tons of meetups outside of the Bay Area. Check out the community page.
If there isn’t a meetup near you, hey, maybe you can start one!
There’s also various online groups that you can join. Slack, Discord, etc.
I hear that The Guild of the Rose is pretty cool and leans more towards pragmatic, real-life improvement types of things. I haven’t done it myself but I get the sense that you’d like it a lot.
You might like Beeminder. You also might enjoy discussing self improvement on their forum.
The CFAR handbook is probably a great resource.
Be careful about stumbling into a Valley of Bad Rationality by accident. When in doubt, I think it’d be good to default to common sense.
Well, if you want the complicated answer: four or five years ago, about when I started lurking here, I came with a good mindset, and intent on learning skills rather than rules, for precisely the reason you mention. That was right before I entered university, and I think I screwed up that bit. Got depressed, and have remained too out of it to actually use rationality to improve my life much since then. But that’s changing, and the first step is to pick up my rationality practice where I left it four years ago, when I started focusing only on reading blog posts to forget them soon afterward.
In other words: yeah, I know that ‘valley of bad rationality’ thing. Just digging myself out of one as we speak, actually.
And, apart from that, thanks for the great advice. Will heed it :-)
Gotcha. I’m sorry to hear about the setback, but I’m glad that things have been getting better recently.
So there aren’t any meetups near you?