I agree for the most part with Tom. Here’s a quote from an article that I drafted last night but couldn’t post due to my karma:
“I read comments fairly regularly that certainly imply that people are less successful or less fulfilled than they might be (I don’t want to directly link to any but I’m sure you can find them on any thread where people start to talk about their personal situation). Where are the posts that give people rational ways to improve their lives? It’s not that this is particularly difficult—there’s a huge psychological literature on various topics (for instance happiness, attraction and influence) that I’m sure people here have the expertise to disseminate. And it would have obvious applications in making people more successful and fulfilled in their day to day lives.
It seems to me that the Less Wrong community concentrates on x-rationality, which is a larger and more intellectually stimulating challenge (and, cynically, better for signalling intellectual prowess) at the expense of simple instrumental rationality. It’s as if we think that because we’re thinking about black belt x-rationality, we’re above applying blue belt instrumental rationality.
In my life I’m constantly learning new and more accurate models with which to understand the world that don’t come near to determining whether to one or two box in pure complexity terms. They are useful more often, though.
This isn’t to denigrate x-rationality. Obviously its important but it currently seems like there’s no balance on LW between that and instrumental rationality. As a side benefit I’ll bet good money that the best way to get people interested in rationality is to simply show them how successful you are when applying it—something that would be more possible with instrumental rationality than x-rationality.”
I disagree with Tom over the terminology though. I quite like the terms x-rationality and instrumental rationality because they allow me to easily talk about two broad types of rational thought even though i would be hard pressed to draw a specific line between them.
I agree for the most part with Tom. Here’s a quote from an article that I drafted last night but couldn’t post due to my karma:
“I read comments fairly regularly that certainly imply that people are less successful or less fulfilled than they might be (I don’t want to directly link to any but I’m sure you can find them on any thread where people start to talk about their personal situation). Where are the posts that give people rational ways to improve their lives? It’s not that this is particularly difficult—there’s a huge psychological literature on various topics (for instance happiness, attraction and influence) that I’m sure people here have the expertise to disseminate. And it would have obvious applications in making people more successful and fulfilled in their day to day lives.
It seems to me that the Less Wrong community concentrates on x-rationality, which is a larger and more intellectually stimulating challenge (and, cynically, better for signalling intellectual prowess) at the expense of simple instrumental rationality. It’s as if we think that because we’re thinking about black belt x-rationality, we’re above applying blue belt instrumental rationality.
In my life I’m constantly learning new and more accurate models with which to understand the world that don’t come near to determining whether to one or two box in pure complexity terms. They are useful more often, though.
This isn’t to denigrate x-rationality. Obviously its important but it currently seems like there’s no balance on LW between that and instrumental rationality. As a side benefit I’ll bet good money that the best way to get people interested in rationality is to simply show them how successful you are when applying it—something that would be more possible with instrumental rationality than x-rationality.”
I disagree with Tom over the terminology though. I quite like the terms x-rationality and instrumental rationality because they allow me to easily talk about two broad types of rational thought even though i would be hard pressed to draw a specific line between them.