Tweetable Rationality

Alexandros

During the latest London Meetup, I asked: "If you could spread one meme about rationality to the mainstream, what would that be?"

I realize that certain parts of rationality, like cognitive biases, should be taught as a unit, but I hypothesize that there exist rationality-enhancing lessons that can fit in 140 characters and stand on their own. Given that we want to spread rationality to those close to us and everyone else as well, it may be useful to work on developing compact versions of our most potent insights, and work on phrasing them in a way that is accessible to the mainstream.

So this thread is a challenge to do just that: pick a rationality-related insight, and try to find 140 characters (or less) that express it well for the purpose of spreading it further. It may be a quote that has appeared in our quotes thread, it may be in the form of a joke, or maybe just a compact insight that can resonate. A non-obvious challenge is to avoid getting evaluated as 'obviously true' and discarded. I guess a better target reaction is ("this sounds intriguing"->"huh, I hadn't thought about this that way!")

Don't worry too much about getting it perfect the first time; we can use the threaded comments system to collaborate. If you see a way to improve a sentence, propose the improvement as a response to it. forming a tree of alternative versions, with votes to sort them.

If you see a version of a meme developed somewhere in the thread that reaches your required awesomeness threshold, you can also post it to your (facebook/twitter/whatever else) followers. I certainly will.

Edit: As per Luke's suggestion, I went and made a twitter account that we can use to tweet good sentences that come out of this thread. Feel free to follow.

During the latest London Meetup, I asked: "If you could spread one meme about rationality to the mainstream, what would that be?"

Edit: As per Luke's suggestion, I went and made a twitter account that we can use to tweet good sentences that come out of this thread. Feel free to follow.

Where there's a smoke there's a fire. Where there's evidence there's a fact.

This doesn't make sense to me. The presence or absence of evidence does not determine whether a fact exists or not. Evidence refers to the basis for a belief. There can be evidence for non-facts (e.g., opinions), as well as no evidence for facts (e.g., whether the nth heaviest dinosaur that ever existed was doing something that we expect there to be a 50% chance of it doing when it was exactly 1 year old).

3Dorikka15y

If one isn't already well versed in rationality, I can see this quote as encouraging people to make overconfident predictions on the basis of insufficient evidence.