Counterargument, depending on what you view the goal of the rationality movement is: If we want to raise the sanity waterline and get the benefits from having a lot of people armed with new insights, we need to be able to explain those insights to people. Take literacy- there’s a real benefit to getting a majority of a population fluent in that technique, something distinct from what you get from having a few people able to read. Imagine if the three rationality techniques most important to you were so widespread that it would be genuinely surprising if a random adult on the street wasn’t capable with them. What would the last year have looked like if every adult knew that arguments are not soldiers, or that beliefs should pay rent? (My social media would be a much more pleasant place if everyone on it knew that nobody is perfect but everything is commensurable.)
We teach math by starting with counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and so on until differential equations or multivariable calculus or wherever ones math education stops. One can argue that we teach math badly (and I would be pretty sympathetic to that argument) but I don’t think “too many easy to understand lessons that teach only one new insight” is the problem. I might go so far as to say we need multiple well written articles on the most important insights, written in a variety of styles to appeal to a wide variety of reader.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before. Thanks for pointing it out.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before.
Was there a word missing after “anticipations of the world”? I’m having trouble parsing as is.
Counterargument, depending on what you view the goal of the rationality movement is: If we want to raise the sanity waterline and get the benefits from having a lot of people armed with new insights, we need to be able to explain those insights to people. Take literacy- there’s a real benefit to getting a majority of a population fluent in that technique, something distinct from what you get from having a few people able to read. Imagine if the three rationality techniques most important to you were so widespread that it would be genuinely surprising if a random adult on the street wasn’t capable with them. What would the last year have looked like if every adult knew that arguments are not soldiers, or that beliefs should pay rent? (My social media would be a much more pleasant place if everyone on it knew that nobody is perfect but everything is commensurable.)
We teach math by starting with counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and so on until differential equations or multivariable calculus or wherever ones math education stops. One can argue that we teach math badly (and I would be pretty sympathetic to that argument) but I don’t think “too many easy to understand lessons that teach only one new insight” is the problem. I might go so far as to say we need multiple well written articles on the most important insights, written in a variety of styles to appeal to a wide variety of reader.
The analogy to focusing really hard on the basics (like math) to create a situation where your actual anticipations of the world is a really good framing that I hadn’t explicitly considered before. Thanks for pointing it out.
Was there a word missing after “anticipations of the world”? I’m having trouble parsing as is.