Well, before you can proclaim greater success, you got to have some results that you can measure without being biased. I see a counter example to the teachings actually working, in the very statement that they are working, w/o the solid evidence.
Apparently knowing of confirmation bias doesn't make people actually try to follow some sort of process thats not affected by bias, instead it is just assumed that because you know of bias it disappears. What I can see here is people learning how to rationalize to greater extent than to which they learn to be rational (if one can actually learn such a thing anyway). I should stop posting, was only meaning to message some people in private.
edit: also, see, foom (and other such stuff) is a good counter example to claim that there's some raising of sanity waterline going on, or some great success at thinking better. TBH whole AI issue looks like EY never quite won the struggle with theist instinct, and is doing theology. Is there even any talks about AI where there's computational complexity etc is used to guess at what AI won't be good at? Did anyone here even arrive at understanding that a computer, what ever it computes, how ever it computes, even with scary many operations per second, will be a bad weather forecaster? (and probably bad many other things forecaster). You can get to human as human to a roundworm and only double the capability on things that are logarithmic in the operations. That's a very trivial thing, that I just don't see understood here.
Well, before you can proclaim greater success, you got to have some results that you can measure without being biased. I see a counter example to the teachings actually working, in the very statement that they are working, w/o the solid evidence.
Hmmmm, you're right, actually. I was using the evidence of "this has helped me, and a few of my friends" - I have decent anecdotal evidence that it's useful, but I was definitely over-playing it's value simply because it happens to land in the "sweet spot" of my social circle. A book like Fre...
I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., language), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be relatively easy to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.
For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, the one on normative systems of rationality:
Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.
From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.
They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. Thinking and Deciding or Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.