A large part of me worries that rationality really can’t be taught; that if you can’t figure out the stuff on Less Wrong by yourself, there’s no point in reading about it.
The teaching calls to what is within the pupil. To borrow a thought from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, if an ass looks into LessWrong, it will not see a sage looking back.
I have a number of books of mathematics on my shelves. In principle, I could work out what is in them, but in practice, to do so I would have to be of the calibre of a multiple Field and Nobel medallist, and exercise that ability for multiple lifetimes. Yet I can profitably read them, understand them, and use that knowledge; but that does still require at least a certain level of ability and previous learning.
Or to put that another way, learning is in P, figuring out by yourself is in NP.
Agreed. I’m currently under the impression that most people cannot become rationalists even with training, but training those who do have the potential increases the chance that they will succeed. Still I think rationality cannot be taught like you might teach a university degree: A large part of it is inspiration, curiosity, hard work and wanting to become stronger. And it has to click. Just sitting in the classroom and listening to the lecturer is not enough.
Actually now that I think about it, just sitting in the classroom and listening to the lecturer for my economics degree wasn’t nearly enough to gain a proper understanding either, yet that’s all that most people did (aside from a cursory reading of the books of course). So maybe the problem is not limited to rationality but more about becoming really proficient at something in general.
The teaching calls to what is within the pupil. To borrow a thought from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, if an ass looks into LessWrong, it will not see a sage looking back.
I have a number of books of mathematics on my shelves. In principle, I could work out what is in them, but in practice, to do so I would have to be of the calibre of a multiple Field and Nobel medallist, and exercise that ability for multiple lifetimes. Yet I can profitably read them, understand them, and use that knowledge; but that does still require at least a certain level of ability and previous learning.
Or to put that another way, learning is in P, figuring out by yourself is in NP.
Agreed. I’m currently under the impression that most people cannot become rationalists even with training, but training those who do have the potential increases the chance that they will succeed. Still I think rationality cannot be taught like you might teach a university degree: A large part of it is inspiration, curiosity, hard work and wanting to become stronger. And it has to click. Just sitting in the classroom and listening to the lecturer is not enough.
Actually now that I think about it, just sitting in the classroom and listening to the lecturer for my economics degree wasn’t nearly enough to gain a proper understanding either, yet that’s all that most people did (aside from a cursory reading of the books of course). So maybe the problem is not limited to rationality but more about becoming really proficient at something in general.