Normal_Anomaly comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 May 2011 09:57PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 May 2011 12:16:51AM 3 points [-]

Running list of major skill areas not yet discussed:

  • Curiosity - the true and honest feeling, or failing that, how to get as close there as possible. Litany of Tarski, "ask whether, not why", Update Yourself Incrementally, etc.
  • Bottom-line stuff - noticing when you already know your destination, hold off on proposing solutions, etc.
  • Connecting belief to anticipation.
  • Use-of-words skills - people trying to milk definitional arguments for inferences, etc.
  • Empiricism - keeping a constant eye out for ways to test things. Not big official scientific reliable tests, just keeping your eyes open.
  • Concreteness / specificity - managing your levels of abstraction (this is surprisingly important in practice).
  • Productivity - adding new good habits, breaking old bad habits, scholarship
  • Argument flow awareness - things like motivated stopping, motivated continuation, flinching away from a counterargument that might carry; also positive aspects like knowing which question an argument is intended to resolve
  • Nonconformity
  • Cooperation
  • Saying oops
  • Munchkinism, minmaxing, "burn the spirit of the game", zs'hanh, assume the problem is solvable and continue solving it
  • Fun
Comment author: Armok_GoB 30 May 2011 06:43:57PM *  8 points [-]

Exercise: Nonconformity, (posibly fun), (possibly curiosity); watch or read from somehting VERY far out of your target demograpic.

Examples: Twilight, My Little Pony Friendship is magic, the Quran. (Note: I have only watched MLP of these examples, and can confirm it will surprise you by being great. For the other two I get an instinctive revulsion saying "that can't POSSIBLY be anything other than slow torture" in spite of knowing taking the outside view says otherwise, which is exactly why I should watch/read from them if I were to do this exercise)

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 30 May 2011 08:13:19PM 2 points [-]

Some data to fill in the gaps in Armok's: I read Twilight with an effort to have an open mind about it. I slightly enjoyed the first three books as romance novels, then the end of the fourth was utterly worthless. Then I noticed the ideas behind the first three books, which were bad. So the series in general is ok, but only if you don't look at it very hard (Luminosity, on the other hand, is good).

I haven't read the Koran, but the scattered parts of the Bible I've read were relatively boring. There are a lot of rules, procedures, genealogies, and distorted history that are really only of interest if one believes the religion.