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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Plant Seeds of Rationality - Less Wrong
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I don't believe these are seeds, such actions don't leave lasting impression that grows under its own power. A lot of energy can be spent in vain correcting specific errors in people who won't take a hint. It might be much more effective to focus on educating people who can actually be expected to make rationality one of the guiding principles in their lives, learning more themselves than an occasional correction by others allows, and some of whom would spend energy propagating the meme.
A textbook on rationality, a rationality seminar, or advertising thereof would be seeds, but probably not arguing with random people who are wrong.
Most seeds planted don't grow into mature trees. It takes more than a handful of seeds to get a good chance of a self sustaining community of plants, it takes extensive cultivation, or a fair amount of luck.
You can drag a horse to water, but you cannot make it study the science of liquid nutrients.
Fortunately with the right level of memetic potency a seed planted in a fertile mind may yield thirty, sixty or a hundredfold!
We must, however, acknowledge that a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic. Let he who as ears to hear (and weak ability for compartmentalism and a dysfunctional sincere-hypocrisy system) let him hear!
EDIT: Drat, beaten to it with respect to allusion to prior usage. I'll leave the comment here for the claim with respect to genetics.
Must we? What is the evidence?
You doubt my good faith; I must doubt yours in interpreting the word "must" in a sense irrelevant to the context. I meant "must" in exactly the sense in which I interpreted you as meaning "must": that is, that the evidence is so strong that it would be irrational not to be substantially moved by it.
Whether you choose to write anything further on the subject is up to you, but please revise your expectation of my good faith upwards.
A "tendency towards rationality" is not the same thing as IQ, nor does it resemble even slightly any of the "big five" personality traits, so any findings on the heritability of those characteristics would not be to the point. How does one even define or measure "a tendency towards rationality" to the standard required, and who has done so? If everyday observation suggests that rationality runs in families, that is insufficient to determine whether genes or upbringing were more important.
Seeing no particular reason to expect that "a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic", and seeing you assert it so strongly, I asked why.
Neither of us are acting in bad faith. I think I was fairly straight with "disagree with your implication except for the technical meaning which is an ironic segue". You were fairly clear too. It is just the way people talk.
From that beginning the best outcome we could expect is to end up arguing about definitions of rationality or straight contradictions on whether the known correlations between cognitive traits are 'rationality' related. Why go there?
Couldn't you just briefly explain your reasoning?
I like the way you asked a question there.
This has the makings of an excellent post.
If you could on the children of engineers/scientists thing, that'd be interesting. I don't know how useful it'd be because I imagine it'd boil down to them being much nerdier than the children of equivalently intelligent groups, such as lawyers, Arts professors or journalists.
This would make a staggeringly excellent paper/thesis and if one were really ambitious one could also include accountants and teachers, who could be further divided by subject.
The easiest way for a current student to do this would be to try and get data on the adult children of all permanent tenured staff at their university.
Thanks :)
NOW: Time to dogpile you with definitional quibbles!
Um, ok then.
I agree. Doing the kind of thing that lukeprog is talking about would be more akin creating the environment where stem cells specialize into skin, bone or muscle cells. We would be creating an environment that rewards rationality, which would guide them into morphing into more rational people.
Is speculating on whether a metaphor is suitable an appropriate topic for Less Wrong?
It may be more of an OvercomingBias thing although it certainly crops up here from time to time too. We call it "Reference Class Tennis". ;)