[SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality

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Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. It is the first post in the series; the introductory post was here, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, The Martial Art of Rationality was originally published on November 22, 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is the martial art of the mind, building on universally human machinery. But developing rationality is more difficult than developing physical martial arts. One reason is because rationality skill is harder to verify. In recent decades, scientific fields like heuristics and biases, Bayesian probability theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology have given us a theoretical body of work on which to build the martial art of rationality. It remains to develop and especially to communicate techniques that apply this theoretical work introspectively to our own minds.

I wonder how important the lack of rationality professionals (defined here as people who are paid to teach rationality) is regarding the lack of rationality dojos, with money being a powerful motivator for actually getting things done?

Learning to be more rational is important to me, so I would gladly pay more than a token fee to join a rationality dojo, but only if it were planned, operated and vetted by Less Wrongers with reasonably high karma or other credentials. I assume that Less Wrongers in general have similar high standards for spending their money: especially those who have read Money: The Unit of Caring. High-quality planning, operation and vetting not only deserve pay but may also require pay as sufficient incentive.

Of course, voiced willingness and even promises to pay are probably not enough. Perhaps we need a prepaid Rationality Dojo Prize to motivate would-be rationality professionals?

What does Less Wrong think on the value of rationality professionals for rationality dojos?

Personally, if faced with someone who was motivated by money and was prepared to teach rationality as a way of obtaining it, I would be very interested in knowing why they'd chosen that route rather than some other, more lucrative route.

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