DuncanS comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong

55 Post author: sketerpot 10 August 2010 02:24AM

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Comment author: MartinB 10 August 2010 03:13:27AM *  5 points [-]

*Candidate 1 requires intuitive understanding of probability, fat chance.

*Candidate 2 would require a rewiring of humans about the system how status is perceived.

*Candidate 3 just does not work. Talk with people about the image they have what scientists do all day. It is bad. Especially when you go to New Agers.

Maybe you assume that people have a consistent world view, or at least the desire to have one, but no. Please try the proposals on real people, and report back. I expect you to run into the problem that objective truth is widely not accepted, and few care to have correct beliefs about the world anyway.

Here my suggestions

  • rate topics in money, as a way to figure out how much time to spend on decision making.

Spend more time on expensive or repeated expenses, less time on cheap single ones.

  • seek out good counterarguments for whichever position you find

That saved me a few times. Look for rebuttals habitually, avoid the confirmation bias. Gets harder with fringe topic.

  • write things down

Thats not so much rationality, but practical advice.

  • checklists

They are easy to explain, lead to better results. Can be tweaked in some ways to make them even better.

  • habit of reviewing after an event => learning from mistakes

How to make new mistakes instead of repeating the old ones. Learning from experience in a more efficient way.

There are some articles here that can be summed up in short. But that will probably not work, because interest in techniques is not particularly widespread. You are subject to inferential distance. When an article seems trivial to you after a few reads & ponderings that indicates that you understood it. Also there is the annoying uncanny valley of rationality, where a little of it just hurts, or gets applied wrong (ever discussed a high-iq person who happens to be religious?).

What are your own favorite techniques that you actually apply?

Comment author: DuncanS 10 August 2010 11:26:17AM 1 point [-]

*Candidate 1 requires intuitive understanding of probability, fat chance.

I agree that an intuitive understanding of probability isn't likely to happen. But what you can do is train yourself to recognise at least some of the situations where your intuitive system is going to mess it up. Hopefully next time you see something and think "What a fantastic coincidence!", your next thought will be "Nice, but remember all the other fantastic coincidences that might have happened and didn't." instead of "My life is so improbable it must have been orchestrated by some unseen force."