Comment on Open Thread: March 4 - 10

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 15:46:52 GMT

You mentioned specific groups which try to reach a specific goal. That's great, on the level of individual goals. But we also need to go more meta. The foreign language group will not tell you to stop learning the language if your life situation changes so that the original purpose of learning the language is no longer valid; or if simply a better opportunity appears and it would be rational to move your limited resources from the language towards something else. Also, if you already haven't decided to study a specific language, the group will not find you and explore with you whether starting learning the language would be a good idea for you.

A rationalist group could help with this. We could already provide this support to each other; on meetups, on skype, on mailing lists. Some of us already use our good friends for this purpose; but the problem is that these friends are not always LW-style rationalists, so sometimes we only get their "cached thoughts" as an advice. Also, some people may use a psychologist; not necessarily as a source of rational advice, but as someone to listen and reflect on obvious irrationalities.

So, I think many of us are already using somewhat similar solutions, but either they were not consciously optimized, or they were optimized only for a partial goal.

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