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shminux comments on A Marriage Ceremony for Aspiring Rationalists - Less Wrong
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Comments (77)
If rationalists fail to reproduce, they quickly lose the democratic-political-metagame.
Only assuming that rationalism is inheritable, which is not at all obvious.
It may not be genetic but it's clearly hereditary.
"Clearly"? I wonder if there are any studies to this effect.
It isn't a case of studies - it's a social contagion - and is thus pretty obviously inherited by non-DNA-based mechanisms.
In the same sense as religion is inherited?
Yes - e.g. see the dictionary - where it talks about the inheritance of property and the right to rule.
Regarding the term "heredity", don't pay attention to this dictionary page, though. Look at this page instead.
Rationalism may not be heritable, but intelligence surely is.
Let's face it, LessWrong and rationalism in general appeal mostly to people with at least 1 SD above average IQ.
It may or may not be inheritable, but I'm tempted to believe that it is "easily" teachable, especially to an unburdened mind not yet filled with the fallacies that school and sociological phenomena are so prone to encourage and reward. At the very least, it seems like the offspring of a rationalist parenthood is much more likely to become a rationalist themselves than the offspring of a single self-convincing pundit.
It's hard to disagree that it is teachable, not sure about the "easy" part. I wonder how one would measure it vs how easy it is to teach some other life skills.
Presumably, by comparing how much time a teacher takes to bring them to a similar level of recognized mastery-usefulness in both rationalism and some other skill / field of knowledge where the teacher is reliably competent and equally knowledgeable in both fields.
I'm just throwing up a conjecture here with the goal of spurring on further thought, though, as the question intrigues me.