- Why should anyone be motivated to learn rationality?
- Rationalists don’t seem that much happier or more successful than non-rationalists
- There ought to be a discipline of cognition that makes its students perceptibly more successful and formidable
- Rationalists need to come together and come up with a systematic program to improve cognition
- How do you systematically test rationality programs and verify that they’re making people more rational?
- Why aren’t rationalists surrounded by a visible aura of formidability?
- Less systematic training
- More difficult verification
- Easier to convince people of the benefits of physical strength than it is to convince people of the benefits of rationality
- People lack the sense that rationality should be trained like a martial art
- Possible counterpoint
- Epistemic viciousness proliferation of mystical beliefs that occurs after a discipline is divorced from real-world feedback
- How does epistemic viciousness arise?
- The art is seen as sacred
- People become emotionally attached to certain techniques
- Incoming students have no choice but to trust the teacher
- Excessive deference to historical masters
- Inability to test new methods or innovations (or verify the accuracy of existing techniques)
- There is no statistical difference in outcomes among different types of psychotherapy
- Yet, there is a proliferation of schools and movements in psychotherapy
- Proliferation occurs despite lack of experimental evidence
- Occurs because the easiest way to gain prestige is to found a new movement
- If you’re going to create an organized practice of anything, you need to come up with a way of determining how well you’re doing in a replicable and statistically rigorous fashion
- How do we verify our ideas on how to improve?
- Three levels:
- Reputational
- Experimental
- Organizational
- Reputational - idea is verified in real world tests, preferably against other ideas
- Experimental - idea is verified by statistically rigorous tests
- Organizational - idea is made difficult to game or fake
- Why is it that flying saucer cults are better at coordination than rationalists?
- Flying saucer cults can use a number of unhealthy techniques to enforce cooperation
- This tends to make them lose touch with reality
- Is there a way to cooperate while retaining an accurate view of reality?
- The lack of cooperative success among rationalists highlights the fact that the current rationalist canon is oriented towards individual rationality, rather than group rationality
- Tolerating only disagreement is as irrational as tolerating only agreement
- You should never do worse with more knowledge
- Need to be more tolerant of strong emotions
- Need to be more tolerant of the idea of sacrifice