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RobinHanson comments on Rational Me or We? - Less Wrong
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It's pretty hard to be isolated in a world of six billion people. The more key question is the probability of coordinating with any randomly selected person on a rationalist topic of fixed difficulty, and the total size of the community available to support some number of institutions.
To put it bluntly, if you built the ideal rationalist institution that requires one million supporters, you'd be in trouble because the 99.98th percentile of rationality is not adequate to support it (and also such rationalists may have other demands on their time).
But if you can build institutions that grow starting from small groups even in a not-previously-friendly environment, or upgrade rationalists starting from the 98th percentile to what we would currently regard as much higher levels, then odds look better for such institutions.
We both want to live in a friendly world with lots of high-grade rationalists and excellent institutions with good tests and good incentives, but I don't think I already live there.
Let me us distinguish "truth-seekers", people who respect and want truth, from "rationalists", people who personally know how to believe truth. We can build better institutions that produce truth if only we have enough support from truth-seekers; we don't actually need many rationalists. And having rationalists without good institutions may not produce much more shared accessible truth.
I'm not sure I can let you make that distinction without some more justification.
Most people think they're truth-seekers and honestly claim to be truth-seekers. But the very existence of biases shows that thinking you're a truth-seeker doesn't make it so. Ask a hundred doctors, and they'll all (without consciously lying!) say they're looking for the truth about what really will help or hurt their patients. But give them your spiel about the flaws in the health system, and in the course of what they consider seeking the truth, they'll dismiss your objections in a way you consider unfair. Build an institution that confirms your results, and they'll dismiss the institution as biased or flawed or "silly". These doctors are not liars or enemies of truth or anything. They're normal people whose search for the truth is being hijacked in ways they can't control.
The solution: turn them into rationalists. They don't have to be black belt rationalists who can derive Bayes' Theorem in their sleep, but they have to be rationalist enough that their natural good intentions towards truth-seeking correspond to actual truth-seeking and allow you to build your institutions without interference.
"The solution: turn them into rationalists."
You don't say how to accomplish this. Would it require (or at least benefit greatly from) institutional change?
I had in mind that you might convince someone abstractly to support eg prediction markets because they promote truth, and then they would accept the results of such markets even if it disagreed with their intuitions. They don't have to know how to bet well in such markets to accept that they are a better truth-seeking institution. But yes, being a truth-seeker can be very different from believing that you are one.
Btw, I only just discovered the "inbox" that lets me find responses to my comments.
This sounds like you're postulating people who have good taste in rationalist institutions without having good taste in rationality. Or you're postulating that it's easy to push on the former quantity without pushing on the latter. How likely is this really? Why wouldn't any such effort be easily hijacked by institutions that look good to non-rationalists?