patrissimo comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong

153 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 September 2010 07:02AM

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Comment author: patrissimo 09 September 2010 06:55:22PM 109 points [-]

I'm disappointed at how few of these comments, particularly the highly-voted ones, are about proposed solutions, or at least proposed areas for research. My general concern about the LW community is that it seems much more interested in the fun of debating and analyzing biases, rather than the boring repetitive trial-and-error of correcting them.

Anna's post lays out a particular piece of poor performance which is of core strategic value to pretty much everyone - how to identify and achieve your goals - and which, according to me and many people and authors, can be greatly improved through study and practice. So I'm very frustrated by all the comments about the fact that we're just barely intelligent and debates about the intelligence of the general person. It's like if Eliezer posted about the potential for AI to kill us all and people debated how they would choose to kill us instead of how to stop it from happening.

Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization. Go spend an hour reading Merlin Mann's site and you'll learn way more instrumental rationality than you do here. Or take a GTD class, or read a top-rated time-management book on Amazon.

Talking about biases is fun, working on them is hard. Do Less Wrongers want to have fun, or become super-powerful and take over (or at least save) the world? So far, as far as I can tell, LW is much worse than the Quantified Self & time/attention-management communities (Merlin Mann, Zen Habits, GTD) at practical self-improvement. Which is why I don't read it very often. When it becomes a rationality dojo instead of a club for people who like to geek out about biases, I'm in.

Comment author: Morendil 11 September 2010 08:20:07AM 2 points [-]

When it becomes a rationality dojo instead of a club for people who like to geek out about biases, I'm in.

What does a "rationality dojo" as you envision it look like?

One thing you could do to help LW become more the kind of forum you'd like it to be is write a top-level post.

Another, if you don't want to do that, is to comment somewhere with the kind of top-level topics you would like to see addressed.

Comment author: patrissimo 12 September 2010 04:14:17AM 7 points [-]

rationality dojo - group of people practicing together to become more rational, not as an intellectual exercise ("I can rattle off dozens of cognitive biases!") but by actually becoming more rational themselves. It would spend a lot more time on boring practical things, and less on shiny ideas. The effort would be directed towards irrationalities weighted by their negative impact on the participant's lives, rather than how interesting they are.

Sure, I will see if I can find the time to write a top-level post on this, thanks for asking.

Comment author: 27chaos 07 November 2014 01:01:35AM 1 point [-]

Bump. Do it.