= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Zack_M_Davis comments on How rationality can make your life more awesome - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
I'm skeptical. The Less Wrong canon is great for training a particular set of widely-applicable abstract thinking skills, but that's not the same thing as domain-general awesomeness. See Yvain's 2009 post "Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great." The sort of people who are receptive to this material aren't primarily being held back by insufficient rationality: the problem is akrasia, the lack of motivation to carry our gloriously rational plans.
One might argue that it is by means of rationality that we will discover and implement effective anti-akrasia techniques. Yes, I hope so, too. But I haven't gotten it to work yet.
Lukeprog and Julia are pretty good examples of how rationality awesomely affects someone who's not afflicted by akrasia as strongly as many of us. Finding a general remedy for akrasia is still a major unsolved problem in the rationalist community, of course.
Anecdotal. Showing how rationality could improve their lives if only they were this way that they are not is not productive. Stinks as hard as "your prayer didn't work because your faith wasn't strong enough".
Analogy:
Person 1: "Penicillin isn't that great- it hasn't helped my flu at all."
Person 2: "It's had awesome results for people with bacterial infections, but it doesn't seem to help with viral ones."
Person 3: "How dare you blame Person 1 for having the wrong kind of infection!"
Person 2: "What the hell?"
well analogized.
You still shouldn't be peddling penicillin as a miracle cure. Likewise with LW rationality.
Except that there are no qualities a person can have that will get prayers to work.
Good point. Do you think non-rationalist people will be able to make that distinction?
I expect everyone who doesn't believe in god would be able to, not all of whom are "rationalist".
That aside, why do you ask? I'm a bit confused by your question.
Never mind; I was doing it wrong.
So, akrasia is not longer a significant problem or obstacle in your life?
No, sorry, that's not what I meant. It's more like---previously, I must have been implicitly thinking of "rationality" as being about verbal intellectual discourse, like the sort of thing we do here. Whereas now it's as if I'm finally starting to glimpse this idea of probability and decision theory as constraints on coherent behavior, with speaking and writing merely being particular types of human behavior that happen to be particularly salient to us, even though the real world is made out of simpler parts that we don't usually think about.