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paper-machine comments on Some potential dangers of rationality training - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
To quote Final Fantasy VI: "How will we know unless we try for ourselves?"
Among other things, it is less painful to learn from other people's mistakes, wherever possible.
Two problems with this 1) the arguments suggest that this could be actually harmful, and it's not clear that you can reverse the effect. Not to mention the opportunity costs. If someone told me that cutting off all contacts with everyone I knew to go and live in an abandoned bus in Alaska would be great for my personal development, I'd consider the potentially harmful aspects and the time given to this, rather than applying the maxim you give 2) that principle can be applied to anything: you'd have to try every programme of study and every life-improvement scheme on the same basis. And aside from any risks (above) you literally would die before you'd finished trying for yourself.
You obviously don't need to be certain that rationality training is good before you do it. But you should have good reasons to think it has a positive net expected value. And a higher one than other schemes (or potentially much higher and you're able to move on to other options if it fails etc)
Research on human subjects is like that. That's why they invented human research ethics and IRBs.
Honestly, I didn't say half of the things in your comment, so I'm not sure how (or even if it's productive) to respond.
Apologies if I've misread you. You seemed to be responding to the claim 'rationality training might have a negative effect' with 'the only solution is to try for ourselves'. I was saying the same principle could be applied to any number of things. If you were simply saying that whether something is good needs to be tested in practice, I agree. But I thought you were saying that we should try rationality training specifically, rather than other methods some think improve your life, (e.g. Scientology). If you're claiming that, then you need some reason to expect better results from rationality training than alternatives.