Note: This was originally posted in the discussion area, but motions to move it to the top level were made.
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My own desire to improve my rationality coupled with some posts criticizing LessWrong not too long ago led to an idea. For reference, the posts I mean are these:
- Goals for which LessWrong does (and doesn't) help
- Self-Improvement of Shiny Distraction: Why LessWrong is anti-instrumental Rationality
- A comment on Humans are not automatically strategic
Unfortunately, I don't know of any resources to help people traverse the path you're facing in a series of small safe steps.
- Most interesting to me was the idea of some form of "rationality comb." An iterative evaluation process. Again, I hardly consider myself the one to design this, but perhaps something like:
- Take 5 minutes and brainstorm about the beliefs you think affect your actions the most
- Focus on the first belief, set(1):belief(1)
- Can you recall how you came to hold this belief?
- What are some common alternative views to your belief?
- Do you think you could provide testable justification for your current belief over the above alternatives?
- If not, can you imagine leaving your belief for one of the alternatives?
- And so on...
- Then repeat with set(1):belief(2). When set(1):belief(n) is finished... re-brainstorm for 5min to come up with set(2):belief(1)...belief(n).
- A series of "homework" problems on Bayesian Probability, perhaps including EY's tutorial and other helpful material.
- Brain teasers or similar items to focus on attentiveness to details, weighing evidence, knowing the limits of what you can know given certain information, etc. I think LW has already provided some good examples of neat things like this (even if they would require refinement).
- Questions that intentionally try to deceive the reader with some form of fallacy or bias
- Tutorials on how to have rational discussions, rules of engagement, reaching a mutual conclusion, etc.
I'd been tossing around the idea of a popular "How to Improve Your Life" sort of site. The user answers questions regarding what they are disappointed in, some 'dance around the bush' type questions to work around people's self-bias and questions to judge education level on various necessary topics.
The system would then weight the answers and calculate what improvements would have the highest cost/benefit. My assumption was that most people would suffer from too little time, irrational beliefs or health issues. A site is then suggested to support improvement.
There are tons of free sites for too little time (GTD), improving health (mostly calorie counters) and knowledge (spaced repetition sites, Khan Academy, etc). There is nothing I know of to step people through rationality. When I say 'step through', think an expert system similar to software 'wizards'.
I've been leaning, and this post helped shove me over, that helping address the lack of a rationality site is the more immediate good. (A rational/informed person wouldn't need a site to point out what areas need improvement, and then google it)
Anyhow....
I plan on starting to outline a rationality specific version of the above and code it for a LAMP stack. Anyone else interested, or have a better suggestion? If no better suggestions, I'll start a sourceforge project.
Very interesting idea -- it would be great if some would help you with the questions and I agree that you may need some tricky ones to pull out the biases and actually target the most immediate areas for improvement. I like the idea!