Can you explain more what you mean by steering vs. pedaling?
What you say about steering vs. pedaling, or about improvements in “thinking and decision-making”, and not so much improvement in “doing stuff”, sounds like it might fit for me and in general. But... really? If so, by what mechanisms?
If we’re better choosing e.g. what path to take toward useful scientific research, or positive relationships, or income, this should increase the amount of useful research, goodness in relationships, or income we gain.
As to myself: my ability to make money as a tutor did increase, once I started actually trying to make money as a tutor (vs. just doing tutoring- and marketing- activities, without tracking what helped students and what made money). I think my visible social skills improved somewhat, but I’m not confident, and I should check with others. My effectiveness at improving the outside state of the world has improved to a ridiculous extent, because I’m working on existential risks now, and my picture of how to make the world a better place used to involve activity that was ridiculously less efficient. My effectiveness at writing decent prose, keeping healthy, etc., has improved... slightly... in the manner that I might’ve expected from just experimenting a bit and reading some non-rationalist self-help literature.
If “good decision making” doesn’t improve one’s actual goal-achievement, why not? Is it just a “feeling” of good decision-making, rather than actual good decision making? Does rationality only work where it isn’t measurable? Does rationality only help much for “really tricky issues” like global philanthropy, and not for questions like how to make money or build positive relationships? Do we just need to actually discuss and practice the “actually apply this rationality to your day-to-day decisions” step?
(Re: this last possibility: I was talking the other day to a good rationalist by OB/LW standards, who comments here fairly often. He was talking about his plans to get a higher-paying job, and how he was undergoing a particular certification process for the purpose. He’d gotten some distance into studying for the certification, but it hadn’t occurred to him to, like, actually look up the wages and employment rates of people who got the certification and to compare to alternatives. “Look into wages before you go through a degree/certification program, if your goal in the job is to make money” should be a cached heuristic for rationalists, and might improve the mundane usefulness of rationality. I don’t know how many other such cached heuristics we should have.)
Can you explain more what you mean by steering vs. pedaling?
To be honest I had the analogy cached from here and it seemed appropriate, but I'll try to clarify. I'm making better decisions on what I do or don't do, at what I keep doing or stop doing, at what I pay attention to or ignore, but I'm not significantly better or faster at the actual doing itself.
I think rationality will help me with that bit, indirectly, by helping me understand what the best skills are to learn for he things I want to do, and which methods work best for learning it and which ...
Related to: Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger), Test Your Rationality, 3 Levels of Rationality Verification.
Robin and Eliezer ask about the ways to test rationality skills, for each of the many important purposes such testing might have. Depending on what's possible, you may want to test yourself to learn how well you are doing at your studies, at least to some extent check the sanity of the teaching that you follow, estimate the effectiveness of specific techniques, or even force a rationality test on a person whose position depends on the outcome.
Verification procedures have various weaknesses, making them admissible for one purpose and not for another. But however rigorous the verification methods are, one must first find the specific properties to test for. These properties or skills may come naturally with the art, or they may be cultivated specifically for the testing, in which case they need to be good signals, hard to demonstrate without also becoming more rational.
So, my question is this - what have you become reliably stronger at, after you walked the path of an aspiring rationalist for considerable time? Maybe you have noticeably improved at something, or maybe you haven't learned a certain skill yet, but you are reasonably sure that because of your study of rationality you'll be able to do that considerably better than other people.
This is a significantly different question from the ones Eliezer and Robin ask. Some of the skills you obtained may be virtually unverifiable, some of them may be easy to fake, some of them may be easy to learn without becoming sufficiently rational, and some of them may be standard in other disciplines. But I think it's useful to step back, and write a list of skills before selecting ones more suitable for the testing.