rationality[...] won’t [...] help you process the immense number of combinations and generate the best one
Intelligence is the lens which sees it’s own flaws. This is a flaw. See that clearly, and you should be able to fix it.
In fact, when I see intelligent people fail at such situations, I immediately want to drag them on to LessWrong and have them read all the sequences, because somewhere in there (and I’m not quite sure where), I figured out all sorts of incredible techniques for actually dealing with exactly that.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome? There are solutions that make it so. They are incredibly hard to arrive at, but there are.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10. I have suspicion that such trains you to fail the real-world situations where you deal with > 101000 possible solutions. People do love familiar approaches, meaning, in those cases they’ll latch on <10 most obvious solutions that come up instantly or were chosen by others, then rationally choose among those, because that’s what the methods here deal with, that’s what they tried to improve. Of course it is better to choose the best one out of easily available solutions, than not the best one, but that doesn’t get anyone any heaps of utility; there are some cases where it looks like it does (market speculation), but it still does not as the system is multiplicative, follows specific sort of power law distribution, and one of the fools with coin tosses is still expected on the top, and still, coming up with methods for trading is a problem with enormous number of solutions.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome?
I have trouble imagining what an entire magnitude of awesomeness would even look like. I tend to intuitively model the question as “what percentage of your life are you satisfied with?” and the answer has almost always been “more than 10% of it”, so you can’t multiply by ten in this context. I’m not really sure of a way to phrase the question where a 10x multiplier is meaningful.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10.
My area of greatest gain is self-awareness, dealing with various mental illnesses/abnormalities, and dealing with relationships (friends, work, romantic). One of my friends recently commented “I run in to the issue when meeting new people—there’s thousands of things I could say, and I can’t figure out where to start!” and my immediate thought was “Oh! I learned how to fix that problem from reading the sequences.”
In general, before LessWrong, I could handle basic “shut up and multiply” without any trouble—a problem with only a few solutions was generally trivial. Where I ran in to issues was exactly that “huge solution space”, and that is where LessWrong has really helped me.
I have definitely noticed that the sequences seem to be surprisingly well written for a wide range of rationality levels—they seem to help you build skills whether you have a little bit or a lot of rationality coming in to this. A lot of what I’ve personally gained from the sequences is simply that “aha!” moment of the final missing piece of the puzzle clicking in to place, because a lot of this is stuff I’ve spent years thinking about.
The other big thing I’ve gained from LessWrong is having very coherent explanations that I can share with others. It makes it very easy to quickly get one of my friends trained up sufficiently to help me bounce around ideas and come up with solutions to problems that are stumping me.
Intelligence is the lens which sees it’s own flaws. This is a flaw. See that clearly, and you should be able to fix it.
In fact, when I see intelligent people fail at such situations, I immediately want to drag them on to LessWrong and have them read all the sequences, because somewhere in there (and I’m not quite sure where), I figured out all sorts of incredible techniques for actually dealing with exactly that.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome? There are solutions that make it so. They are incredibly hard to arrive at, but there are.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10. I have suspicion that such trains you to fail the real-world situations where you deal with > 101000 possible solutions. People do love familiar approaches, meaning, in those cases they’ll latch on <10 most obvious solutions that come up instantly or were chosen by others, then rationally choose among those, because that’s what the methods here deal with, that’s what they tried to improve. Of course it is better to choose the best one out of easily available solutions, than not the best one, but that doesn’t get anyone any heaps of utility; there are some cases where it looks like it does (market speculation), but it still does not as the system is multiplicative, follows specific sort of power law distribution, and one of the fools with coin tosses is still expected on the top, and still, coming up with methods for trading is a problem with enormous number of solutions.
I have trouble imagining what an entire magnitude of awesomeness would even look like. I tend to intuitively model the question as “what percentage of your life are you satisfied with?” and the answer has almost always been “more than 10% of it”, so you can’t multiply by ten in this context. I’m not really sure of a way to phrase the question where a 10x multiplier is meaningful.
My area of greatest gain is self-awareness, dealing with various mental illnesses/abnormalities, and dealing with relationships (friends, work, romantic). One of my friends recently commented “I run in to the issue when meeting new people—there’s thousands of things I could say, and I can’t figure out where to start!” and my immediate thought was “Oh! I learned how to fix that problem from reading the sequences.”
In general, before LessWrong, I could handle basic “shut up and multiply” without any trouble—a problem with only a few solutions was generally trivial. Where I ran in to issues was exactly that “huge solution space”, and that is where LessWrong has really helped me.
I have definitely noticed that the sequences seem to be surprisingly well written for a wide range of rationality levels—they seem to help you build skills whether you have a little bit or a lot of rationality coming in to this. A lot of what I’ve personally gained from the sequences is simply that “aha!” moment of the final missing piece of the puzzle clicking in to place, because a lot of this is stuff I’ve spent years thinking about.
The other big thing I’ve gained from LessWrong is having very coherent explanations that I can share with others. It makes it very easy to quickly get one of my friends trained up sufficiently to help me bounce around ideas and come up with solutions to problems that are stumping me.