Epistemic status: Believed, but hard to know how much to adjust for opportunity costs
I'm wondering whether stand-up comedy would be a good way to expand and test one's "rationality skills" and/or just general interaction skills. One thing I like about it is that you get immediate feedback: the audience either laughs at your joke, or they don't.
Prominent existential risk researcher Nick Bostrom used to be a stand-up comedian:
For my postgraduate work, I went to London, where I studied physics and neuroscience at King's College, and obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics. For a while I did a little bit stand-up comedy on the vibrant London pub and theatre circuit.
It was also mentioned at the London LW meetup in June 2011:
Comedy as Anti-Compartmentalization - Another pet theory of mine. I was puzzled by the amount of atheist comedians out there, who people pay to see tell them that their religion is absurd. (Yes, Christian comedians exist too. Search YouTube. I dare you.) So my theory is that humour serves as a space where patterns and data from different fields are allowed to be superimposed on one another. Think of it as an anti-compartmentalization habit. Due to our brain design, compartmentalization is the default, so humour may be a hack to counter that. And we reward those who do it well with high status because it's valuable. Maybe we should have transhumanist/rationalist stand-up comedians? We sure have a lot of inconsistencies to point out.
Diego Caliero thinks that there would be good material to draw upon from the rationalist community.
Does anyone have any experience trying this and/or have thoughts on whether it would be useful? Also, does anyone in NYC want to try it out?
Additionally, humor - especially self-effacing humor - allows one to critique ideas or people held in high esteem without being offensive or inciting anger. It's hard to be mad when you're laughing.
Thought: Humor lowers one's natural barriers to accepting new ideas.
In the context of ideas as memes that undergo Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection, perhaps humor can be thought of as an immunodeficiency virus? A way to lower an idea's natural defenses against competing ideas, which is why we see Christians willing to listen to Atheist comics, and vice versa. Humor lowers Christianity's natural defenses against Atheism (group consolidation, faith, etc.) and allows new ideas to attack the weakened "body."