If a good rationalist could predict with reasonably high probability what methods good rationalists would use in 50-100 years, wouldn't said rationalist immediately update to use those methods now, invalidating his own prediction?
Not if those options are currently too computationally difficult to run. For instance, I'm currently considering the prediction "In the future, good rationalists will use today's rational methods of thinking, but they will use them faster and with more automation and computer assistance."
To give an example, imagine if a person currently posting on Less Wrong was much older, and was still posting about rationality. And that person had a little helper script that would interject into an argument you were going to make with "Is this part here a...
One of the standard methods of science-fiction world-building is to take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future, and see what comes out. One trend I've observed is that over the last century or so, people have kept coming up with clever new ways to find answers to important questions - that is, developing new methods of rationality.
So, given what we do currently know about the overall shape of such methods, from Godel's Incompleteness Theory to Kolmogorov Complexity to the various ways to get around Prisoner's Dilemmas... Then, at least in a general science-fictional world-building sense, what might we be able to guess or say about what rationalists will be like in, oh, 50-100 years?