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GabrielDuquette comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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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.