Robin Hanson has identified a breakdown in the metaphor of rationality as martial art: skillful violence can be more or less entirely deferred to specialists, but rationality is one of the things that everyone should know how to do, even if specialists do it better. Even though paramedics are better trained and equipped than civilians at the scene of a heart attack, a CPR-trained bystander can do more to save the life of the victim due to the paramedics’ response time. Prediction markets are great for governments, corporations, or communities, but if an individual’s personal life has gotten bad enough to need the help of a professional rationalist, a little training in “cartography” could have nipped the problem in the bud.
To put it another way, thinking rationally is something I want to do, not have done for me. I would bet that Robin Hanson, and indeed most people, respect the opinions of others in proportion to the extent that they are rational. So the individual impulse toward learning to be less wrong is not only a path to winning, but a basic value of a rationalist community.
One can think that individuals can profit from being more rational, while also thinking that improving our social epistemic systems or participating in them actively will do more to increase our welfare than focusing on increasing individual rationality.
Robin Hanson has identified a breakdown in the metaphor of rationality as martial art: skillful violence can be more or less entirely deferred to specialists, but rationality is one of the things that everyone should know how to do, even if specialists do it better. Even though paramedics are better trained and equipped than civilians at the scene of a heart attack, a CPR-trained bystander can do more to save the life of the victim due to the paramedics’ response time. Prediction markets are great for governments, corporations, or communities, but if an individual’s personal life has gotten bad enough to need the help of a professional rationalist, a little training in “cartography” could have nipped the problem in the bud.
To put it another way, thinking rationally is something I want to do, not have done for me. I would bet that Robin Hanson, and indeed most people, respect the opinions of others in proportion to the extent that they are rational. So the individual impulse toward learning to be less wrong is not only a path to winning, but a basic value of a rationalist community.
One can think that individuals can profit from being more rational, while also thinking that improving our social epistemic systems or participating in them actively will do more to increase our welfare than focusing on increasing individual rationality.
Another thing that you must do for yourself is politics; sadly EY is right that we can’t start discussing that here.