Swimmer963 comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Swimmer963 24 July 2013 10:02PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (117)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Swimmer963 25 July 2013 08:34:15PM 2 points [-]

I would say that rationality is worth trying to spread because it may be a good idea, and because it's something I know about and can think and plan about. Do you know of another community that has a similar level of development to LW (i.e. fairly cohesive but still quite obscure) that I should also investigate? (AFAIK, CFAR is looking for such organizations for new ideas anyway.)

Also, I'm going to update from your comment in the direction of rationality outreach turning out not being the best use of my time.

Comment author: cousin_it 28 July 2013 09:31:26AM *  5 points [-]

For a while I satisfied my idea-spreading urges by teaching math to talented kids on a volunteer basis. If you're very good at something (e.g. swimming), you could try teaching that, it's a lot of fun.

Or you could spend some effort on figuring out how to measure rationality and check if someone is making progress. That's much harder though, once you get past the obvious wrong answers like "give them a multiple choice test about rationality". Eliezer and Anna have written a lot about this problem.

Comment author: Swimmer963 29 July 2013 03:51:26PM 0 points [-]

I do teach swimming; I did for many years as a job, and now I do it for fun (and for free) to the kids of my friends (and several of the CFAR staff when I was in San Francisco). It's something I'm very good at (I may be more at teaching swimming to others than swimming myself), and it fulfills an urge, but not the idea-spreading one.

If CFAR is looking for help trying to make a rationality test, I would be happy to help, too...