= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Swimmer963 comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (117)
I am highly skeptical of this happening with human psychology kept constant, basically because I think rationality is de facto impossible for humans who are not at least ~2 standard deviations smarter than the mean. (I also suspect that most LWers have bad priors about what mean intelligence looks like, including me.)
I think a more achievable goal is to make the concept of rationality cool. Being a movie star, for example, is cool but not normal. Rationality not being cool prevents otherwise sufficiently smart people from exploring it. My model of what raising the sanity waterline looks like in the short- to medium-term is to start from the smartest people (these are simultaneously the easiest and the highest-value people to make more rational) and work down the intelligence ladder from there.
Making rationality cool = an excellent starting point. I still disagree on the rationality-intelligence thing, though; I think you could teach skills that could still meaningfully be called epistemic/instrumental rationality to people with IQ 100 and below. Not everyone, anymore than it's possible to persuade everyone from childhood that it's a good idea to spend money sensibly. (Gaah this is a pet peeve for me). But enough to make the world more awesome.
I'm going to register that disagreement as a bet, and if in 10 years LW is still around and enough has happened that we know who's right, I will find this comment and collect/lose a Bayes point.
Let's make a more specific bet: I anticipate that any attempts by CFAR in the next 10 years to broaden the demographic that attends its workshops to include people with IQ within a standard deviation of mean (say in the United States) will fail by their standards. Agree or disagree?
Agree. But "workshops" includes any future instructor-led activities they might do, including shorter formats i.e. 3-hour or 1-day, larger groups, etc.