[I know that this is not the whole point of this post. I’m just responding to the part that is my personal pet peeve.]
I think it’s in general harmful to make excuses for why rationalists are supposed to be weak. Because, you know, they really do wipe the floor with the competition, if they go far enough in the art. Why would you discourage yourself, and others, by saying that for this or other reason it’s reasonable to expect rationalists to be unsuited for real-world combat? No it’s not! It is painful to hold oneself to high standards, because then failure feels like failure. And yet if you want to walk the path, you won’t go anywhere far by going around spending effort on making excuses for why these high standards don’t apply to you. Even if the excuse is everyone else around is just the same, and even when this is in fact mostly what happens. Bah! You’ll still do better if you can think I will not invent convenient excuses for failure, no matter how reasonable they sound.
I agree with you. Rereading my post, I do see a bit of a “rationalist apologist” vibe that I didn’t want.
I could have been clearer by emphasizing, “Here’s one particular reason why some of us were/are failing. Given that this could be your problem, here’s how to overcome that problem and continue on your path to being able to wipe the floor with the competition.”
It may be that the community already has a standard article on this; I’d be happy with a link. It may also be that I should read more rigorously about what exactly a rationalist is. If there is no standard article, I’m curious about your thoughts.
It’s not something there are standard materials on, and I duly acknowledge that the bar to make you take off because of rationality is pretty damn high. If you never did, try to personally meet some of the handful of “recognized celebrities” of the rationality community, and take a close look at what they do.
I agree that we should always be very careful before we allow ourselves an excuse, but I also believe that rationalists don’t seem to succeed as much as we might naively expect and that if we want to do better, we’ll have to first identify the source of he problem. Hazard manages to offer a really interesting take on this: that we underestimate the difficulty of improving on social norms from first principles (I provided some examples of how normal thinking can be better than we’d expect in my recent post on De-centering Bias). Unless we fully recognise the benefits of normal person thinking, it is going to be very easy to come up with a plan of action that is actually worse. And, I feel that we often do fall into this trap, because normal people are doing what they are doing either unreflectively or just because that is what everyone else is doing and we assume that just because we have put more thought into it than them, surely we’ll get a better outcome. Once we realise that this issue exists, we can be more cautious in rejecting social norms or in doing anything too weird and hopefully actually end up more successful than average. (As Elizier says, it is dangerous to be half a rationalist).
[Content warning: unpopular opinion.]
[I know that this is not the whole point of this post. I’m just responding to the part that is my personal pet peeve.]
I think it’s in general harmful to make excuses for why rationalists are supposed to be weak. Because, you know, they really do wipe the floor with the competition, if they go far enough in the art. Why would you discourage yourself, and others, by saying that for this or other reason it’s reasonable to expect rationalists to be unsuited for real-world combat? No it’s not! It is painful to hold oneself to high standards, because then failure feels like failure. And yet if you want to walk the path, you won’t go anywhere far by going around spending effort on making excuses for why these high standards don’t apply to you. Even if the excuse is everyone else around is just the same, and even when this is in fact mostly what happens. Bah! You’ll still do better if you can think I will not invent convenient excuses for failure, no matter how reasonable they sound.
I agree with you. Rereading my post, I do see a bit of a “rationalist apologist” vibe that I didn’t want.
I could have been clearer by emphasizing, “Here’s one particular reason why some of us were/are failing. Given that this could be your problem, here’s how to overcome that problem and continue on your path to being able to wipe the floor with the competition.”
I think I know what you mean by “rationalists really do wipe the floor with the competition.” But in the interest of precision, what do you mean? I’m not convinced they do; I alluded to this in my post here: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/dPLLnAJbas97GGsvQ/leave-beliefs-that-don-t-constrain-experience-alone
It may be that the community already has a standard article on this; I’d be happy with a link. It may also be that I should read more rigorously about what exactly a rationalist is. If there is no standard article, I’m curious about your thoughts.
It’s not something there are standard materials on, and I duly acknowledge that the bar to make you take off because of rationality is pretty damn high. If you never did, try to personally meet some of the handful of “recognized celebrities” of the rationality community, and take a close look at what they do.
I agree that we should always be very careful before we allow ourselves an excuse, but I also believe that rationalists don’t seem to succeed as much as we might naively expect and that if we want to do better, we’ll have to first identify the source of he problem. Hazard manages to offer a really interesting take on this: that we underestimate the difficulty of improving on social norms from first principles (I provided some examples of how normal thinking can be better than we’d expect in my recent post on De-centering Bias). Unless we fully recognise the benefits of normal person thinking, it is going to be very easy to come up with a plan of action that is actually worse. And, I feel that we often do fall into this trap, because normal people are doing what they are doing either unreflectively or just because that is what everyone else is doing and we assume that just because we have put more thought into it than them, surely we’ll get a better outcome. Once we realise that this issue exists, we can be more cautious in rejecting social norms or in doing anything too weird and hopefully actually end up more successful than average. (As Elizier says, it is dangerous to be half a rationalist).