robzahra comments on The Benefits of Rationality? - Less Wrong
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Yes. I've been a semi-regular reader of OCB for about a year. I think it's an interesting blog. But have I learned anything useful from it? Has it made any practical difference in the choices I make, either day-to-day or longterm? The answer is no. Admittedly, this may be my own fault. But I recall a post, not too long ago, soliciting people's feedback on "the most important thing you learned from OCB in the past year," or something of that sort. And while there were lots of people excitedly posting about how much OCB has taught them, the examples they gave were along the lines of "I learned the power of fundamental attribution error!" or "I learned the importance of continually adjusting my priors!" with curiously few examples of real differences OCB made in anyone's practical choices. This raises the question: if tweaking our rationality has no appreciable affect on anything, then how can we say we're really tweaking our rationality at all? Perhaps we're just swapping new explanations for fundamentally irrational processes that are far too buried and obscure to be accessible to us.
That said, I think things like the recent posts on akrasia are strong moves in the right direction. Intellectually interesting, but with easy to grasp real-world implications.
Ob has changed people's practical lives in some major ways. Not all of these are mine personally:
"I donated more money to anti aging, risk reduction, etc"
"I signed up for cryonics."
"I wear a seatbelt in a taxi even when no one else does."
"I stopped going to church but started hanging out socially with aspiring rationalists."
"I decided rationality works and started writing down my goals and pathways to them."
"I decided it's important for me to think carefully about what my ultimate values are."
Yes! Or even further, "I am now focusing my life on risk reduction and have significantly reduced akrasia in all facets of my life."
This sounds an awful lot like one of the examples I gave above. Ok, so you're focused on "risk reduction" and "reducing akrasia." So what's that mean? You've decided to buckle-up, wear sunscreen, and not be so lazy? Can't I get that from Reader's Digest or my mom?
Telling people to buckle up is nothing special. Successfully persuading people to buckle up - helping people understand and fix the internal sources of error that stood in the way of doing so in the past - will save a life if you can do it enough.