= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DaFranker comments on How to illustrate that society is mostly irrational, and how rationality would be beneficial - 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)
Comments (41)
Society is made up of individuals. If you can demonstrate that individuals are irrational, then you have a better chance at claiming that the society is too. Yudkowsky wrote about the sanity waterline rather late when he had already covered a lot of other topics and I think this was intentional.
You can't just start from the assumption that society would be more rational if rationality was taught at school. You'd also need evidence that rationality can be taught to a lot of average people. I don't think such evidence exists. Whatever taken out from the curriculum might be replaced by something completely ineffective.
Of course, if changing the curriculum would make some of the smarter individuals more rational, and leave the average student with nothing, the result might still be a net positive. This argument wouldn't convince anyone professing egalitarianism however.
Individual benefits are far easier to sell than societal benefits. They're easier to imagine, examples are available, they're near rather than far, self interest is inherently motivating, and your reader won't be mindkilled by politics. If you can get the reader to accept the individual benefits, then you might be able to extrapolate a bit from there.
The title of this post is misleading, since you're not illustrating anything but asking for advice.
Can't specific rationality techniques be effectively taught to a large amount of average people, though? I vaguely recall that there might be some examples of that in studies where the researchers taught participants a trick or two before submitting them a test of some sort, but my ability to recall specific examples is almost geometrically inverse to gwern's, so that certainly takes out of my point.
I know of no evidence that this is possible -- where "effectively" means "after several years still actively using these techniques in their lives".
I could swear there was research on delaying gratification that matched this criteria. It's not clear in the Wikipedia article whether the hot-cold strategy was prescriptive or descriptive, but I thought I remembered there being a prescriptive study that correlated with positive outcomes later in life