This idea has interested me a lot and I really want to see data on outcomes. I know CFAR is trying to do this but is anyone else doing this? Anyone who visits this site, can they see how the decisions they’re making now are leading to improved outcomes?
Are the better outcomes that happen in my life due to the fact that I really am making better decisions or are they mostly because my parents never got divorced, etc....
I don’t think I can offer info on how rationality affects later life outcomes. There’s a bunch of confounding / lurking variables in the space, and I’m unsure what to say substantially (Scott’s recent posts on IQ have also shifted me towards more uncertainty, but I’m also not really following all of what’s been researched.)
Here’s what I think we do seem to know:
Debiasing people in the short-term is possible.
People who get calibration training end up more calibrated / make better predictions.
Lots of goal-setting/getting techniques have been shown to be effective in allowing people to achieve their short-term goals, e.g. go on diets, exercise more, floss more, etc.
What I personally seem to have gained from CFAR-esque material is sort of in the way of “stuff I can’t easily verabalize and thus is also perhaps suspicious from the outside view because all I can do is mumble things like ‘ontological upgrade’”.
Concretely, though, I can point to basically 3 TAPs which I have as concrete habits which I counterfactually wouldn’t have had, had I not been exposed to the CFAR content:
A TAP for putting down to-dos into my phone. (Paired w/ switching the ring on my finger to the other hand, in a “string on the wrist” sort of a way.)
A TAP for asking people for examples during conversations.
A TAP for not immediately getting angry when I feel frustrated in conversations.
In the spirit of the OP, it definitely seems like these little TAPs do add up over time. So even if all the other stuff isn’t there (which I emphatically claim that it subjectively feels like it is), I think I’ve personally still benefited.
I’m not sure if this is possible, but I think I’m looking for something like “I used this TAP and got this result where past me would not have used a TAP and gotten this other result which is demonstrably worse”.
This might be a good test of the calibration idea and making better predictions. Can we accurately predict what would happen without the extra thinking tools?
(Slight nitpick is that I meant ‘calibration’ in the Tetlock sense, like being able to make informed judgments about how global events will play out, but I agree there’s certainly an analogous component that maps onto ‘how well you can predict your own life’.)
I currently don’t think that I have good answers to them, so this is sort a placeholder reply until me (or someone else) puts in more thoughts into this line of inquiry.
This idea has interested me a lot and I really want to see data on outcomes. I know CFAR is trying to do this but is anyone else doing this? Anyone who visits this site, can they see how the decisions they’re making now are leading to improved outcomes?
Are the better outcomes that happen in my life due to the fact that I really am making better decisions or are they mostly because my parents never got divorced, etc....
Anyone have any thoughts on how to evaluate this?
I don’t think I can offer info on how rationality affects later life outcomes. There’s a bunch of confounding / lurking variables in the space, and I’m unsure what to say substantially (Scott’s recent posts on IQ have also shifted me towards more uncertainty, but I’m also not really following all of what’s been researched.)
Here’s what I think we do seem to know:
Debiasing people in the short-term is possible.
People who get calibration training end up more calibrated / make better predictions.
Lots of goal-setting/getting techniques have been shown to be effective in allowing people to achieve their short-term goals, e.g. go on diets, exercise more, floss more, etc.
What I personally seem to have gained from CFAR-esque material is sort of in the way of “stuff I can’t easily verabalize and thus is also perhaps suspicious from the outside view because all I can do is mumble things like ‘ontological upgrade’”.
Concretely, though, I can point to basically 3 TAPs which I have as concrete habits which I counterfactually wouldn’t have had, had I not been exposed to the CFAR content:
A TAP for putting down to-dos into my phone. (Paired w/ switching the ring on my finger to the other hand, in a “string on the wrist” sort of a way.)
A TAP for asking people for examples during conversations.
A TAP for not immediately getting angry when I feel frustrated in conversations.
In the spirit of the OP, it definitely seems like these little TAPs do add up over time. So even if all the other stuff isn’t there (which I emphatically claim that it subjectively feels like it is), I think I’ve personally still benefited.
I’m not sure if this is possible, but I think I’m looking for something like “I used this TAP and got this result where past me would not have used a TAP and gotten this other result which is demonstrably worse”.
This might be a good test of the calibration idea and making better predictions. Can we accurately predict what would happen without the extra thinking tools?
These are all very good questions.
(Slight nitpick is that I meant ‘calibration’ in the Tetlock sense, like being able to make informed judgments about how global events will play out, but I agree there’s certainly an analogous component that maps onto ‘how well you can predict your own life’.)
I currently don’t think that I have good answers to them, so this is sort a placeholder reply until me (or someone else) puts in more thoughts into this line of inquiry.