What does it take to commit to wanting rationality from a beginning of irrationality?
Deciding that being less wrong than I am now is valuable, realizing that doing what I’ve been doing all along is unlikely to get me there, and being willing to give up familiar habits in exchange for alternatives that seem more likely to get me there. These are independently fairly rare and the intersection of them is still more so.
This doesn’t get me to wanting “rationality” per se (let alone to endorsing any specific collection of techniques, assumptions, etc., still less to the specific collection that is most popular on this site), it just gets me looking for some set of tools that is more reliable than the tools I have.
I’ve always understood the initial purpose of LW to be to present a specific collection of tools such that someone who has already decided to look can more easily settle on that specific collection (which, of course, is endorsed by the site founder as particularly useful), at-least-ostensibly in the hope that some of them will subsequently build on it and improve it.
Getting someone who isn’t looking to start looking is a whole different problem, and more difficult on multiple levels (practical, ethical, etc.).
Deciding that being less wrong than I am now is valuable, realizing that doing what I’ve been doing all along is unlikely to get me there, and being willing to give up familiar habits in exchange for alternatives that seem more likely to get me there. These are independently fairly rare and the intersection of them is still more so.
This doesn’t get me to wanting “rationality” per se (let alone to endorsing any specific collection of techniques, assumptions, etc., still less to the specific collection that is most popular on this site), it just gets me looking for some set of tools that is more reliable than the tools I have.
I’ve always understood the initial purpose of LW to be to present a specific collection of tools such that someone who has already decided to look can more easily settle on that specific collection (which, of course, is endorsed by the site founder as particularly useful), at-least-ostensibly in the hope that some of them will subsequently build on it and improve it.
Getting someone who isn’t looking to start looking is a whole different problem, and more difficult on multiple levels (practical, ethical, etc.).