Every modern intellectual citizen ought to become familiar with at least some of the major ideas in the rationalist canon. This includes R:AZ, The Codex, Superforecasting, How to Measure Anything, Inadequate Equilibria, and Good and Real.
I am not sure what exactly you mean with “modern intellectual citizen”. At the broadest, it could encompass all adults, at the narrowest, it would be limited to college professors & public intellectuals.
I also doubt that this is a productive method of raising the Sanity Waterline. We’re here in a place where many people have had their minds pretty strongly changed by these texts, but reading e.g. the reviews of R:AZ on Amazon & Goodreads, I observe that many people read it, say “meh” and go on with their lives – a pretty disappointing result for reading ~2000 pages!
Furthermore, aren’t sufficiently intellectual people already familiar with some of the ideas in the “rationalist canon”, just by exposure to the scientific method? I think yes, and I also think that the most valuable aspect of these texts is not the ideas in and of themselves, but rather the type/structure of thinking they demand? (E.g. scout vs. soldier mindset).
Thanks, good questions. I had originally written “every responsible intellectual citizen” but that didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t want so much to morally condemn people who haven’t read what I find important, but to highlight the fact that news of general intellectual progress does not seem to move as fast as news of progress in science. So I could forgive someone for not knowing about Fun Theory calculations nowadays, even if they were a circumspect philosopher in the 1980s—they’ve let themselves fall out of touch, but news travels slowly and communication has changed so it’s not totally their fault.
I also doubt that this is a productive method of raising the Sanity Waterline. We’re here in a place where many people have had their minds pretty strongly changed by these texts, but reading e.g. the reviews of R:AZ on Amazon & Goodreads, I observe that many people read it, say “meh” and go on with their lives – a pretty disappointing result for reading ~2000 pages!
Yeah, you’re probably right about the Sanity Waterline. I didn’t know about those amazon reviews though :[
Furthermore, aren’t sufficiently intellectual people already familiar with some of the ideas in the “rationalist canon”, just by exposure to the scientific method?
Well to illustrate my motivation here, I’ve occasionally made bets with my most infovorous coworkers, but they would always insist on doing even odds. I tried to explain odds ratios, loss aversion, and the linear utility of small amounts of money, but of course that never worked. But when I’m hanging out with rationalists, this problem doesn’t happen.
EDIT: Here’s the same frustration from a different angle: suppose I have these three intellectual friends. Alice is a normal-ish physics student who likes to feed her extra-curricular curiosity mostly by reading and listening to Sean Carroll. Bob is a reddit junkie who watches Science YouTube and supplements with Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein’s podcasts. Charlie is a tech worker who likes to read Vox for infotainment, and he’s been exposed to a handful of EA ideas and a few SSC posts, all of which made him think “whoa, cool”, but none of which made him slide down the rabbit hole. Maybe I can get Alice to make bets with me and to agree that anthropics is an important part of the frontier of philosophy, but for some reason she is still just so weak with futurism—she seems to still be leaning on Jetsons-style archetypes without realizing it. I can have serious, productive conversations with Bob about our coming cyberpunk weirdtopia, but when I bring up prediction markets, he—lacking the background knowledge about EV, odds ratios, and betting—doesn’t really seem to get it. I’m arguing politics with Charlie, and I make reference to “the naive view of free will” and he asks me to stop and explain. Oh right, I think and start looking for an alternate approach to what I’m trying to say. Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all getting some relatively high-quality exposure to the scientific method in action, but whenever I talk to one of them, I end up thinking, gods, when will this concept become more widespread?
Nice post.
I mostly agree, but this bit stood out to me:
I am not sure what exactly you mean with “modern intellectual citizen”. At the broadest, it could encompass all adults, at the narrowest, it would be limited to college professors & public intellectuals.
I also doubt that this is a productive method of raising the Sanity Waterline. We’re here in a place where many people have had their minds pretty strongly changed by these texts, but reading e.g. the reviews of R:AZ on Amazon & Goodreads, I observe that many people read it, say “meh” and go on with their lives – a pretty disappointing result for reading ~2000 pages!
Furthermore, aren’t sufficiently intellectual people already familiar with some of the ideas in the “rationalist canon”, just by exposure to the scientific method? I think yes, and I also think that the most valuable aspect of these texts is not the ideas in and of themselves, but rather the type/structure of thinking they demand? (E.g. scout vs. soldier mindset).
Thanks, good questions. I had originally written “every responsible intellectual citizen” but that didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t want so much to morally condemn people who haven’t read what I find important, but to highlight the fact that news of general intellectual progress does not seem to move as fast as news of progress in science. So I could forgive someone for not knowing about Fun Theory calculations nowadays, even if they were a circumspect philosopher in the 1980s—they’ve let themselves fall out of touch, but news travels slowly and communication has changed so it’s not totally their fault.
Yeah, you’re probably right about the Sanity Waterline. I didn’t know about those amazon reviews though :[
Well to illustrate my motivation here, I’ve occasionally made bets with my most infovorous coworkers, but they would always insist on doing even odds. I tried to explain odds ratios, loss aversion, and the linear utility of small amounts of money, but of course that never worked. But when I’m hanging out with rationalists, this problem doesn’t happen.
EDIT: Here’s the same frustration from a different angle: suppose I have these three intellectual friends. Alice is a normal-ish physics student who likes to feed her extra-curricular curiosity mostly by reading and listening to Sean Carroll. Bob is a reddit junkie who watches Science YouTube and supplements with Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein’s podcasts. Charlie is a tech worker who likes to read Vox for infotainment, and he’s been exposed to a handful of EA ideas and a few SSC posts, all of which made him think “whoa, cool”, but none of which made him slide down the rabbit hole.
Maybe I can get Alice to make bets with me and to agree that anthropics is an important part of the frontier of philosophy, but for some reason she is still just so weak with futurism—she seems to still be leaning on Jetsons-style archetypes without realizing it. I can have serious, productive conversations with Bob about our coming cyberpunk weirdtopia, but when I bring up prediction markets, he—lacking the background knowledge about EV, odds ratios, and betting—doesn’t really seem to get it. I’m arguing politics with Charlie, and I make reference to “the naive view of free will” and he asks me to stop and explain. Oh right, I think and start looking for an alternate approach to what I’m trying to say.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all getting some relatively high-quality exposure to the scientific method in action, but whenever I talk to one of them, I end up thinking, gods, when will this concept become more widespread?