Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for April 5-14.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Rationality Diaries archive

Next post: 4/15-29

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for April 5-14.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Rationality Diaries archive

Next post: 4/15-29

As I was skimming recent comments, I was struck by the tension between this comment:

(I find it horrifying how easy it is to spread irrational memes, without any... consequences. I mean, if someone distributed poison to people, they would get arrested. But distribute poisonous memes and the only consequence is that the people who refuse to drink are sometimes called closed-minded and intolerant.)

...and this comment:

Is still feels strange to me that people who participate in terrorist groups, rob banks, etc. are welcome at universities; while people who suggest that maybe women have less mathematical geniuses than men are unwelcome.

I was doubly struck when I went back to compare the two comments and realized they shared the same author.

Of course, one way to reconcile them is if I assume that the strangeness you experience in the second example derives from academics being made unwelcome by spreading what you class as harmless or valuable ideas, like gender differences in math genius frequency, rather than (as I'd originally inferred) deriving from academics being made more unwelcome due to their seen-as-antisocial ideas rather than their seen-as-antisocial behaviors.

To me there is a big difference between saying "X is an interesting hypothesis, let's check it experimentally" and saying "X is a deep wisdom, if you disagree, you are simply not wise enough". I generally don't get angry at people for suggesting a hypothesis, as long as they admit it is just a hypothesis. I get angry at people for presenting something as an absolute truth, if I later discover it was a bullshit.

In the first case, the meme "if you didn't do something, it only means it wasn't really important for you" was present... (read more)

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Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14

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Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14

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