= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Rationality & Low-IQ People - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (107)
Most people go through life using cultural memes that they soak up from their environment. These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful: for example, most cultures don't have memes advocating that you stick your hand in fires. Following these cultural memes is a low-variance strategy: you might not become overwhelmingly successful this way, but you'll also avoid many failure modes.
A basic aspect of LW-style rationality involves questioning and rethinking everything, including these cultural memes. As such, it's a high-variance strategy: you might end up with new memes that are much better or much worse than standard memes. This might be okay if you're quite good at questioning and rethinking things, but if you aren't (and even if you are!), you might afflict yourself with a memetic immune disorder and head towards all sorts of failure modes as a result (joining a cult being the sort of stereotypical thing).
I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird, and I think this is probably overall a reasonable aversion for most people to have, as it helps them avoid many failure modes.
For the meme; not necessarily for the person who holds it. Dying for one's fatherland can be a very successful meme. And that's exactly why questioning memes is often a good thing for the questioner.
I think the reason most people are averse to questioning is simply due to the social drive to conform, which does not strongly depend on the quality of the norms you're conforming to. And the drive to associate in cliques and dislike outsiders, which sometimes causes people to associate in similar-IQ cliques and dislike those other stupid/smart people and their rationalist/irrational ideas.
I mean, yeah, but my point is most of the time a desire to conform is adaptive.
It's adaptive, but not just because the common memes are good; it's in large part because others people act against those who don't conform.
Of course questioning memes needn't lead to rejecting them.
This suggests that instead of trying to influence the behaviors of low-IQ folks, we're better off trying to influence the behavior of folks whose IQs are slightly lower than ours, then, having influenced them successfully, aim for a slightly lower IQ, etc. Figure that the dumber you are, the greater the degree to which you have learned to distrust your own bad reasoning and "go with the herd". So to get to the low-IQ folks, create a wave throughout the population starting with the high-IQ folks.
(Actually a more straightforward implication of this might be to work harder saturating the high-IQ echelons with LW ideas, since they still haven't been saturated, then start working on lower-IQ folks.)
See also
Excellent points.
I observe this in regard to religion and it's memes, and I think it applies to the non-rationalist community generally.
It perhaps makes more sense to replace "too weird" with "too different from the cultural norm". Christianity, for instance, has very weird beliefs compared to what science and common sense tells us. Adherents persist in believing in large part to continue conforming to the cultural norm, despite it's weirdness.
The interesting question (to me) is whether someone who is not predisposed to enjoying LW-style rationality ought to pursue it if they seek to optimize their happiness. If you are a happy Christian who believes God is madly in love with you and can't wait to bring up to your mansion in heaven post mortem, then LW is going to be depressing.
Even if you're just a regular old None or agnostic who likes to believe in warm fuzzy concepts like "everything happening for a reason" and Karm and Serendipity, then LW's deterministic, magic-killing, purely materialist views are a bit of a buzzkill.
It is possible that rationality training is a net bad for ceratin individuals because ignorance really is bliss in many circumstances.
This is a good observation. It still leaves open the question of helping (or self-help advise) for people of sufficient intelligence to perceive that LW-style "rationality" is correct in some sense, but cannot quite put it together themselves into a useful framework from a bunch of blog posts :). I do think CFAR has a role in this, Stanford's Ron Howard took it all the way to (non gifted-) high school level:
http://www.orms-today.org/orms-8-04/teaching.html
http://decisioneducation.org/
The two things this can accomplish is to create better "non-weird" cultural memes than society provides out of the box, and in the long term perhaps establishing priesthood of rationality where people can escalate important/complicated decisions to more expert authorities.