Desrtopa comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong

140 Post author: Yvain 09 April 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 23 January 2011 09:55:39PM 8 points [-]

...but you will disagree with me. And we are both aspiring rationalists, and therefore we resolve disagreements by experiments. I propose one.

I'm surprised you expected most of your readers to disagree. I think it's pretty clear that the techniques we work on here aren't making us much more successful than most people.

Humans aren't naturally well equipped to be extreme rationalists. The techniques themselves may be correct, but that doesn't mean we can realistically expect many people to apply them. To use the rationality-as-martial art metaphor, if you taught Shaolin kung fu to a population of fifty year old couch potatoes, they would not be able to perform most of the techniques correctly, and you should not expect to hear many true accounts of them winning fights with their skills.

Perhaps with enough work we could refine the art of human instrumental rationality into something much better than what we've got, maybe achieve a .3 correlation with success rather than a .1, but while a fighting style developed explicitly for 50 year old couch potatoes might give your class better results than other styles, you can only expect so much out of it.