[SEQ RERUN] Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes

MinibearRex

Today's post, Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes was originally published on 29 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many causes benefit particularly from the spread of rationality - because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander. Not just the obvious causes like atheism, but things like marijuana legalization. In the case of my own work this effect was strong enough that after years of bogging down I threw up my hands and explicitly recursed on creating rationalists. If such causes can come to terms with not individually capturing all the rationalists they create, then they can mutually benefit from mutual effort on creating rationalists. This cooperation may require learning to shut up about disagreements between such causes, and not fight over priorities, except in specialized venues clearly marked.

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Today's post, Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes was originally published on 29 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many causes benefit particularly from the spread of rationality - because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander. Not just the obvious causes like atheism, but things like marijuana legalization. In the case of my own work this effect was strong enough that after years of bogging down I threw up my hands and explicitly recursed on creating rationalists. If such causes can come to terms with not individually capturing all the rationalists they create, then they can mutually benefit from mutual effort on creating rationalists. This cooperation may require learning to shut up about disagreements between such causes, and not fight over priorities, except in specialized venues clearly marked.

I agree that one can learn skills to impress people, and those skills are very useful. Also that intelligent people have an advantage in this: the intelligence itself is impressive, and can help learn those skills faster.

On the other hand, humans are not automatically strategic (even the intelligent ones), "charisma" is not a one-dimensional value (different things impress different people), and there is also some tension... let's say it this way: most good scientists would fail doing a car salesman's job, and most car salesmen would fail to do good science.

The quoted proverb does not use LW terminology, so "idiots" in this context means highly irrational people, and "an intelligent person" means both intelligent and rational person. The translation would be that irrational people are surprisingly quick at detecting rational people and making coalitions against them.

The problem with "manipulating idiots" is when you are also trying to accomplish a different goal with a different audience at the same time. For example your audience is 50% reasonable people and 50% "idiots" mixed together, and you are trying to explain a reasonable plan to those reasonable people... but either you speak to the reasonable people and the "idiots" interrupt you, or you manipulate the "idiots" and the reasonable people see the problems with your arguments.

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