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Nick_Tarleton comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
Would you consider a top-level post about this?
(FWIW, I, at least, see emotional self-awareness as a core rationality skill.)
If you're interested in this, we should be talking about CBT and related techniques, which are essentially a form of rationalism training directed at those biases which feed eg depression and anxiety disorders. If rationalism training were brought into schools, some CBT techniques should be part of that.
Yes, CBT and related techniques are exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.
I don't think most rationalists are aware of them though, and it's not because rationalists suffer from none of the problems for which they are especially effective or because they have already addressed the problems via other means.
I would hold myself to much higher standards for a top-level post than for a comment, and I'm extremely busy at the moment, so I won't be able to do a top-level post for at least the next couple of weeks.
If anybody else has thought about this issue as well and wants to write a top-level post, feel free to do so. If I don't see such a post, then I'll write one up when I have time in a couple of weeks.