This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.
"I used to buy lottery tickets every day but now I understand the negative expectation of the gamble and the diminishing marginal utility of the ticket, so I don't."
A doctor says "I now realize that I was giving my patients terrible advice about what it meant when a test showed positive for a disease. Now that I have been inducted into the Secret Order of Bayes, My advice on that is much better now."
That comment of mine was from 2010 and I disagree with it now. My current opinion is better expressed in the "Epiphany addiction" post and comments.
7JoshuaFox
Thanks. In most of those links, the author says that he gained some useful mental tools, and maybe that he feels better. That's good. But no one said that rationality helped them achieve any goal other the goal of being rational.
For example:
* Launch a successful startup
* Get a prestigious job
* Break out of a long-term abusive relationship.
* Lose weight (Diets are discussed, but I don't see that a discussion driven by LW/SI-rationality is any more successful in this area than any random discussion of diets.)
* Get lucky in love (and from what I can tell, the PUAs do have testimonials for their techniques)
* Avoid akrasia (The techniques discussed are gathered from elsewhere; so to the extent that rationality means "reading up on the material," the few successes attested in this area can count as confirmation.)
* Break an addiction to drugs/gambling.
... and so on.
Religious deconversion doesn't count for the purpose of my query unless the testimonial describes some instrumental benefit.
Carl's comment about the need for an experiment is good; but if someone can just give a testimonial, that would be a good start!
Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3
From the original thread:
Ask away!