Raemon comments on Drawing Less Wrong: An Introduction - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Raemon 13 November 2011 10:39PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (38)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 14 November 2011 09:53:45AM *  6 points [-]

What interested me was how much the study of drawing was relevant to rationality. Not only do you have to learn to observe reality (this is surprisingly hard), but you have to pretty much scrap your entire model of how you think drawing works. (Almost everything you will naturally gravitate towards is wrong). Most artists don't notice that they should be applying these lessons to the rest of their life, but I think the skills can generalize if attention is brought to that notion.

It seems to me that everything about drawing that makes it a good training ground for rationality is even more true of, say, long range precision rifle shooting. Also, evaluating your progress is easier because the metrics are more objective (targets don't lie) and your biases are more apparent (you can go so far as quantifying your biases by fractions of a centimeter and even giving them directionality in 3-dimensional space).

"Hey, can I shoot you?" is somewhat less appropriate as a conversational gambit, compared to "Can I draw you".

Your response misses the point. Obviously, I didn't have marksmanship in mind for helping you approach people on the subway. I believe the primary goal of this sequence was to explore how to improve general rationality through drawing, not merely better social skills through drawing. It is my contention that various shooting sports teach skills that are just as or more readily transferable to other domains that require rationality. Of course, I am willing to be corrected by Raemon as to his/her intention in writing this sequence.

Comment author: Raemon 14 November 2011 02:54:25PM *  7 points [-]

Your response misses the point

I think your response misses the joke.

But yes, I think this could be an interesting. I have a mild phobia of guns (that I don't see a need to override), but I would be interested to read the material. In general, I am a fan of Less Wrong articles that talk about a real, instrumental goals we have had and how we achieved them, as long as the experience can be tied to rationality tools.

Put another way: Technically, ANYTHING you can win at relates to instrumental rationality, insofar as you can always rationally choose not to think about too hard about it (i.e. dancing and sex may require you to deliberately turn off certain parts of your brain). My litmus test for "should this be a Less Wrong article" is: "Did your 'rational approach' to this subject consist primarily of identifying that Less Wrong skills weren't that relevant and then following conventional wisdom, or did you actually have to use tools that you learned here?"

I know others may disagree with me on this (my post's already been downvoted at least once), but anything that connects rationality to actual instrumental success seems like a good idea to me.