Ok, I think I understand your meaning of “great rationalist” now. You are talking about people who helped humanity make great advances but at some point claimed certainty where they should have said “I don’t know.” They failed to discern the edge of their knowledge, ran off a cliff and then denied it. Would that be fair?
Davorak
Karma: 491
I am not sure I follow your second definition let me reword part of your two definitions to make sure I parsed it correctly.
“one who practices rationality” vs “one who produces results considered rational in retrospect”
Do these match your pair?
Going meta takes resources. Resources could instead be applied directly to the problem in front of you. If not solving the problem right in front of you causes long term hard to recover from problems it makes sense to apply your resources directly to the problem at hand.
So:
(any intellectual question → how am I supposed to answer questions like that? → epistemology → Bayesianism → nature of probability → decision theory)
Seems rational when enough excess resources are available. To make more people follow this path you need:
To increase the resources of those you are trying to teach.
Lower the resource cost of following the path
Lesswrong.com and Lesswrong meetup groups teach life skills to increase the members resources. At the same time they gather people who know skills on the path with those who want to learn lowering the resource cost of following the path. Many other methods exist, I have just mentioned two. A road is being built it has just not reached where you are yet.
Perhaps you are ahead of the road marking the best routes, or clearing the ground, but not everyone have the resources to get so far without a well paved road.
Can you give an example? My initial reaction is that I could only consider such rationalists decent and only if their failure to update was in a narrow field. Great rationalist should be good and epistemic rationality and should be able to update based on convincing evidence.
Rationalists are often bad at noticing success and failure.
I have always thought that noticing success and failure was a key part of being a great rationalist. How can you improve if you can not tell a success from a failure? How can you decided to update or say oops?
Should the Houston May 22 meetup be added to this post or should it want until the next one? http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5pp/houston_hackerspace_meetup_sunday_may_22_500pm/
Next Sunday in Houston: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5pp/houston_hackerspace_meetup_sunday_may_22_500pm/
If you want to make a trip out of it the location where it is being held should be open from 11:00 in the morning until the meeting.
If you have any questions specifically for me I will answer them here.
Isn’t the straight forward answer to not communicate in cached thoughts, build everything form shared fundamentals and over time build a new shared language to explain modern concepts to Archimedes?
The rules do not seem to stop this and as long as Archimedes is dedicated to the task you could communicate arbitrarily complex ideas.
What role do you plan on playing in increasing world wide rationality other then writing your current series of posts?
What mark do you want your life to make on the world?
What is the most important skill you are developing right now and why is it important to your future?
From what source do you draw the majority of your motivation from?
What is your largest(most important) goal and why is it important to you? Both personal and nonpersonal goal if there is any difference between the two for you.
What do you plan on working on after graduation?
How long have you been at standford? How much longer do you expect to be there?
Brevity is key to implementation.
I like this idea. It can be difficult to read sequences if post after post you already agree with the idea. It would be wonderful to have the sequences compressed so that it was possible to easily find the sections which are new ideas so reading could be more targeted.
I don’t know the LDS example “Your purpose on earth is to become like God” is pretty big. Big goals are good if they are back up with supportive low-level goals.
I agree completely. I do not think of them as my pair, they were just a tool to help understand your pair.
I now think I understand the pair you were trying to communicate. When I read great rationalist I think of someone who has successfully applied rationality over a great breadth of their life. So “one who practices rationality” but are not “one who produces results useful to rational decision-making” and those that “one who produces results useful to rational decision-making” but are not “one who practices rationality” have both only implement rationality in a limited breadth of their life and I would not have described either as great rationalists, at least when keeping all other variables equal.