There are two different things commonly called "grammar".
One of them is the structure of one's native language, which one needs in order to communicate. This is learned well before school. It is how you know to say "I want an apple, please" and not "Apple a please want I." Learning this sort of grammar is instinctive and unavoidable; you can't not learn it, if you're a little kid exposed to language users (spoken or signed) at all. And yes, it is complex — but we also have "designed-in" abilities to learn it.
The other thing called "grammar" is a collection of rules for a high-status register of one's native language, which one needs in order to sound "educated" rather than "ignorant". The meta-rule behind these rules is "Find ways to avoid speaking like a member of the underclass." It is how you know to say "I'd like to ask you a question" and not "I wanna aks you a question, yo." There is nothing about a high-status register of language that makes it any more capable of accurately representing the world than a low-status register. Truth can be represented in the speech of South Central L.A. just as well as it can be represented in a Harvard accent.
Yes. It illustrates, not proves.
Compare:
Grammar as a collection of rules is taught from a very young age, and is merely for signalling and more easily avoiding ambiguous statements in specific contexts. It is also very complex, and extremely hard to acquire and master - which is exactly why, I've been told, it's taught starting at a very young age and all throughout compulsory education, and often well into higher education institutions.
Rationality is taught once you've already learned, mostly the wrong way, all they think anyone needs to know, and it m...
As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,
Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,
patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,
These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,
patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.
Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people improve their lives by training them in instrumental rationality. We've done some preliminary market research to get an idea of where the opportunities might lie. In fact, this venture got started when, on a whim, I ran a poll on ask500people.com asking,
I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":
These numbers were much higher than I expected, especially the numbers from India, which still puzzle me. Googling around a bit, though, I found an instructor-led online decision-making course for $130, and a one-day decision-making workshop offered in the UK for £200 (over $350)... and the Google keyword tool returns a large number of search terms (800) related to "decision-making", many of them with a high number of monthly searches.
So it appears that there may be a market for training in effective decision-making -- something that could be the first step towards a more comprehensive training program in instrumental rationality. Some obvious market segments to consider are business decision makers, small business owners, and intelligent people of an analytical bent (e.g., the kind of people who find Less Wrong interesting). An important subset of this last group are INTJ personality types; I don't know if there is an effective way to find and market to specific Meyers-Briggs personality types, but I'm looking into it.
"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does. One life coach of 12 years described a typical client as age 35 to 55, who is "at a crossroads, must make a decision and is sick of choosing out of safety and fear." Life coaches working with individuals typically charge around $100 to $300 per hour. As far as I can tell, training in decision analysis / instrumental rationality is not commonly found among life coaches. Surely we can do better.
Can we do effective training online? patrissimo thinks that gathering in person is necessary, but I'm not so sure. His evidence is that "all the people who have replied to me so far saying they get useful rationality practice out of the LW community said the growth came through attending local meetups." To me this is weak evidence -- it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality. In any event, it's worth testing whether online training can work, since
To conclude, one of the things an entrepreneur needs to do is "get out of the building" and talk to members of the target market. We're interested in hearing what you think. What ideas do you think would be most effective in training for instrumental rationality, and why? What would you personally want from a rationality training program? What kinds of products / services related to rationality training would you be interesting in buying?