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pedanterrific comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: FAWS 11 April 2012 03:39AM

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Comment author: mstevens 11 April 2012 01:46:49PM 13 points [-]

I don't actually go to meetups, but Harry's comments about anti-conformity training made me wonder if it'd be worth trying.

You could retest the original experiment, see if lesswrongians can avoid it through knowledge of the effect.

You could mock obviously true statements to practice withstanding opposition.

You could practice the ability to do harmless but nonconformist things to gain the ability to do so if the situation called for something unusual, but you might otherwise be too conformist or embarassed. (each meeting attendee shall order a coffee whilst wearing the ceremonial tea-cosy!). I suspect some of this overlaps with PUA a little and easily veers into general confidence building.

I don't know if rehearsals would do any good, but you could go through the motions of not complying with the Milgram experiment, making people handle little fake emergencies...

You could wonder if EY is planning things like this for the Center for Modern Rationality.

Comment author: pedanterrific 12 April 2012 12:03:34AM *  2 points [-]

From www.hpmor.com/notes/82/:

The Center for Modern Rationality is offering $50 prizes for any suggested rationality training exercises that look good enough to test, and $500 prizes for any suggested exercises that we actually adopt into a unit. Specific descriptions of mental skills, accompanied by the request for exercises to teach them, have been posted for the units Be Specific and Check Consequentialism. (Think of this as trying to invent the actual content of the bizarre exercises that Harry has been inflicting on the Chaos Legion since Ch. 29… oh, wait, I haven’t mentioned those in the text yet, have I?)

Comment author: mstevens 12 April 2012 10:18:37AM 1 point [-]

Hmm, interesting.

I may well have read that and forgotten the Harry reference, I knew he was working on exercises.