satt comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - Less Wrong
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I'm fairly sure I used "qualitative" with a standard meaning. Namely, as an adjective indicating "descriptions or distinctions based on some quality rather than on some quantity", a quality being a discrete feature that distinguishes one thing from another by its presence or absence (as opposed to its degree or extent). Granted, it would've been better to use the word "binary"; substitute that word and I think my point stands.
Thanks for elaborating. That (and this subthread) clarify where you're coming from. I think we agree that someone one or two SDs below the mean would be hard to mould into a noticeably saner or more strategic person. The lingering bit of disagreement is for people that far above the mean, with IQs of 120-125, say.
While I wouldn't expect to see such a stark effect of rationality training for people with IQs of 120-125, I doubt I'd see it for people with even higher IQs, either. If one randomly assigns half of a sample of workers to undergo intervention X, and X raises job performance by (e.g.) a standard deviation, job performance is still a pretty imperfect predictor of which workers experienced X. (And that's assuming job performance can be observed without noise!) So I predict rationality training wouldn't have an effect that's "noticeable" in the sense you operationalize it here, even if it successfully boosted job performance among people with IQs of 120-125.