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lukeprog comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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I'm having difficulty knowing what level of rationalist this is aimed at. Are the people you talk to every week students of rationality, or 'normal' people?
This post applies to both, I imagine. But because you talk about "people" instead of explicitly talking about people like me, it's easy to see this post as not being aimed at me. (Maybe it's not).
What I mean is: It's easy to praise oneself and one's peers by talking about people of a lower class. When I was young, it was 'dumb people', when I was a bit more sophisticated it was 'theists', when I was an Objectivist, it was 'non-Objectivists', and now that I'm a rationalist the temptation is to criticize those who "know almost nothing of logic, probability theory, argument, scientific method, epistemology, artificial intelligence, human cognitive science, or debiasing techniques." So this post, because it isn't clearly directed at people who have worked hard to do better in the ways prescribed by the Sequences, causes my semiconscious mind to ask: "is this a beginning level post, or something I should actually pay attention to?" Are you telling me to do better, or criticizing outsiders in order to promote group bonding?
Of course my rider knows I should pay attention; I must always work harder to cultivate the virtues. And I don't actually expect that you're just trying to promote group bonding. But what I really want - and what this post may not have been designed for - is a honest criticism of people you see who are a lot like me in that they have access to all the same correct memes as I have, and they have exerted effort to improve in the appropriate areas.
My target audience was meant to be ambiguous. Even the most curious people I know spend some of their time not looking very curious. My post is meant as a vignette of the human condition, like a scene from Gummo, and also (I hope) "valuably motivating (by way of shaming)."
I'm wary of being inspired by an example that I can't actually attain even through my best and most honest efforts. I would like to know -- and maybe it isn't possible to find out -- what it is about you, Luke Muehlhauser, that makes you such a persistent belief updater? At a biological level, even.
If variation in populations is a fact of life, then why wouldn't there be graduated levels of rationalist ability?
I predict you're selling yourself short. Maybe my weaknesses and shortcomings are largely filtered out if you know me only through my writings, but the people I work with every week could list them for you. There is clearly a level (or 5) above my own.
Moreover, I've been studying rationality for years, and since April have had the benefit of working on rationality or x-risk full time.
It's very hard to tell "what it is about me" that gives me the rationalist powers I do possess, but if I had to guess, the single biggest thing would be my deep desire to say oops whenever appropriate, which I suspect I got from having wasted 21 years of my life for failing to say oops about the supernatural. I don't want to waste my time like that again.
I could be selling myself short. And I'm certainly not surrounded by rationalist superheroes -- quite the opposite, in fact.
I should have been more specific. You're not so much famous here for how rational you are, but for the freakishly outlying amount of time you're capable of devoting to a particular kind of activity: studying stuff.
I wonder how much of that sort of sustained focus is just something you were born with, and whether it inclines you to activities that require such focus. Yes, you were Christian for 21 years, but you stopped being one in part because you were able to focus enough to read lots and lots of books disconfirming your beliefs -- itself an extremely unusual thing to do.
Then again, plenty of people with outlying levels of studiousness don't become rationalists. Despite some evidence to the contrary, monasteries probably aren't breeding grounds for atheism. And plenty of people with low mental energy have strong bullshit detectors.
So I guess I don't know.
I for one have read it as a possible criticism to what I do, exactly along the lines of "don't just look like you're curious and comment on LW and think that you're better because you share the beliefs of the coolest tribe" but go out and really do learn something...
(... so I ended up commenting on LW and thinking I'm even better than the people described above... to increase the number of relevant illustrations :P)