William_Quixote comments on Examples of Rationality Techniques adopted by the Masses - Less Wrong

12 Post author: edanm 07 June 2014 02:03PM

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

Comments (31)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: William_Quixote 09 June 2014 06:41:44PM 6 points [-]

One example that many people have adopted is googling things. It used to be that if people disagreed about some random fact (like if Norway or Iceland had more people) they would argue about it. Now someone will google it pretty quickly. This is widespread enough that it might not even feel like a rationality technique, but it is, and a powerful one at that.

This shows that people will adopt them, and do it in big enough numbers that it seems normal as long as it is made sufficiently easy.