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Yvain comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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I'm confused about this article. I agree with most you've said, but I'm not sure the point is exactly. I thought the entire premise of this community was that more is possible, but we're only "less wrong" at the moment. I didn't think there was any promise of results for the current state of the art. Is this post a warning, or am I overlooking this trend?
I agree we shouldn't see x-rationality as practically useful now. You don't rule out rationality becoming the superpower Eliezer portrays in his fiction. That is certainly a long ways off. Boyle's Law and weather prediction is an apt analogy. Just trying harder to apply our current knowledge won't go very far, but there should be some productive avenues.
I think I'd understand your purpose better if you could answer these questions: In your mind, how likely is it that x-rationality could be practically useful in, say, 50 years? What approaches are most likely to get us to a useful practice of rationality? Or is your point that any advances that are made will be radically different from our current lines of investigation?
Just trying to understand.
I'll admit I might be attacking a straw man, but if you read the posts linked to on the very top, I think there are at least a few people out there who believe it, or who don't consciously believe it but act as if it's true.
Depends how you reduce "practically useful". Reduce it to "a person randomly assigned to take rationality classes two hours a week plus homework for a year will make on average ten percent more money than a similar person who doesn't", my wild completely unsubstantiated guess is 50% likely. But I'd give similar numbers to other types of self-improvement classes like Carnegie seminars and that sort of thing.
If by "useful practice of rationality" you mean the way Eliezer imagines it, I think there should be more focus on applying the rationality we have rather than delving deeper and deeper into the theory, but if I could say more than that, I'd be rich and you'd be paying me outrageous hourly fees to talk about it :)
I do think non-godlike levels of rationality have far more potential to help us in politics than in daily life, but that's a minefield. In terms of easy profits we should focus the movement there, but in terms of remaining cohesive and credible it's not really an option.