Something that I think would make rationalists more effective at convincing people is if we had explicit models of the things we care about.
Currently we are at the stage of physicists arguing that the atom bomb might ignite the atmosphere without concrete math and models of how that might happen.
If we do this for lots of issues and have a norm of making models composable this would have further benefits.
People would use the models to make real world decisions with more accuracy
We would create frameworks for modelling that would be easily composable, that other people would use
Both would raise the status and knowledge of the rationalist community.
Proposal for new social norm—explicit modelling
Something that I think would make rationalists more effective at convincing people is if we had explicit models of the things we care about.
Currently we are at the stage of physicists arguing that the atom bomb might ignite the atmosphere without concrete math and models of how that might happen.
If we do this for lots of issues and have a norm of making models composable this would have further benefits.
People would use the models to make real world decisions with more accuracy
We would create frameworks for modelling that would be easily composable, that other people would use
Both would raise the status and knowledge of the rationalist community.