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johnlawrenceaspden comments on Elitism isn't necessary for refining rationality. - Less Wrong
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Comments (91)
I don't think people who feel comfortable posting average youtube comments are going to be welcome or useful at LessWrong, I don't think this is a problem, and there are a lot of people like that.
Raising the sanity waterline on a grand scale should affect the comments on youtube, but we're a long way from that.
This being said, I'd like to see more rationality materials for people of average intelligence, but that's another long term possibility. Not does there not seem to be huge interest in the project, figuring out simple explanations for new ideas is work, and it seems to be be a relatively rare talent.
I only recently ran into a good simple explanation for Bayes-- that the more detailed a prediction becomes, the less likely it is to be true. And I got it from a woman who doesn't post on LW because she thinks the barriers to entry are too high. (It's possible that this explanation was on LW, and I didn't see it or it didn't register--- has anyone seen it here?)
There's some degree of natural sorting on LW-- I'm not the only person who doesn't read the more mathematical or technical material here, and I'm not commenting on that material, either.
I don't think having separate ranked areas is going to solve the problem of people living down to expectations.
That looks like part of the definition of probability.
Bayes would be more like 'If you've got two ideas about what's going on, and one of them says one thing's going to happen, and the other says a different thing, but in the event it's the first thing that happens, then you should believe the first idea more and the second idea less'.
Or to get a bit less abstract, say you're playing dungeons and dragons, and and orc hits you with a sword, and you're pretty sure that orcs do either 1D12 or 2D6 of damage, then if the orc does 2 damage, you should think 'probably 1D12', but if she does 7 damage, you should think 'probably 2D6'.
Does anyone know of any games that normal human beings play that could be used in this sort of example? I mean, apart from, you know, life.