JenniferRM comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong

105 Post author: patrissimo 14 September 2010 04:17PM

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Comment author: JenniferRM 15 September 2010 04:31:31AM 4 points [-]

Yvain's Doing Your Good Deed For The Day included a related study that actually got through peer review and connected it to a pastor who wrote about how it helped him understand his flock better.

Also, this works for me as an example of the kind of thing that I think LW excels at: processing criticism into reparative impulses that might work, while keeping more factors in mind than a single person's criticism/action/outcome cycle is likely to handle well. I think its easy to think "I'm doing something bad, I must change!" and then you leap into something not so well considered and it still doesn't work so well. Having this sort of content in our "canon" probably helps avoid some of the dumber things we might otherwise have done in an attempt to self-improve.