You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ShardPhoenix comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: lukeprog 27 August 2012 12:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (179)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaFox 27 August 2012 07:49:35PM *  5 points [-]

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!

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 28 August 2012 01:14:27PM 1 point [-]

I think LW-style thinking may have helped me persist better at going to the gym (which has been quite beneficial for me) than I otherwise would have, but obviously it's hard to know for sure.