= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
whpearson comments on Rationality Activism: Open Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (18)
In terms of spreading rationality it might be best to take the indirect approach. Consider, the people that invented the computers we use meant that lots of us know computer programming and have the vocabulary to talk about bayes theory.
So one possibility is to invent very useful technologies that require people to have a rationalist mind set in order for them to use.
I'm also of a show don't tell mindset, if we become super successful at getting what we want people will want to read out biographies and emulate us. This approach also keeps us honest, if we aren't more successful or interesting than other people then we probably don't have much worth talking to them about.
In short I don't like trying to convince people directly.
I would like to convince other people to play the same game as me. Rather than having very smart people thinking about how to solve some arbitrarily selected hard problem, I would rather they take a step back and make a desperate effort on humanity's behalf.
I think this is true regardless of whether I am more successful or interesting than they are.
and
I don't think that these two ideas are at all contradictory. Ideally, we'd want people to to step back and try and help humanity, but in reality I think it would probably be very helpful to the goal of getting more rationalists (maybe even necessary?) for rationalists to be clearly successful.
I found these ideas pretty interesting.
I was thinking about that a bit, how increasing something like economic prosperity seems to help a lot of things (education, governmental stability, decreased violent crime, etc.) as well as other effects like decreasing religiosity. Note: I'm not going to try and cite these claims, it was more the general idea than these specifics. If anyone wants to make a rationality promoting-plan based on this strategy then more research needs to be done.
I think that you're right that inventing computers made considerably more people learn computer programming, but I'm not sure how much it's raised the sanity waterline for non-programmers.
This was, to me, the most intriguing idea. Do you have any vague ideas of technologies which require rationality to use? It seems pretty easy to get a cargo-cult understanding of something and be able to use it without understanding how it works.
I guess it could also happen with something that only rationalists would want to use, like cryonics or mind uploading. Though, I feel like part of the reason to want to promote rationality is to speed up development of things like that.