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Risto_Saarelma comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion
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[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
You can expect to have about as much success effectively and systematically teaching rationality as you could in effectively and systematically teaching wisdom. Attempts for a systematic rationality curriculum will end up as cargo cultism and hollow ingroup signaling at worst and heuristics and biases research literature scholarship at best. Once you know someone's SAT score, knowing whether they participated in rationality training will give very little additional predictive power on whether they will win at life.
I'd like to hear a more substantive argument if you've got one. Do you think there are few general-purpose life skills (e.g. those purportedly taught in Getting Things Done, How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc.)? What's your best evidence for this?
I think that there is a huge unseen component in life skills where in addition to knowing about a skill, you need to recognize a situation where the skill might apply, remember about the skill, figure out if the skill is really appropriate given what's going on, know exactly how you should apply the skill in that given situation and so on. There isn't really an algorithm you can follow without also constantly reflecting on what is actually going on, and I think that in what basically looks like another instance of Moravec's paradox, the big difficult part is actually in the unconscious situation awareness and the things you can write in a book like GTD and give to people are a tiny offshoot on that.
No solid evidence for this except for the observation that there don't seem to be self-helpy systems for general awesomeness that actually do consistently make people who stick with them more awesome.
OK, what if you were to, say, at the end of each day brainstorm situations during the day when skill X could have been useful in order to get better at recognizing them?
Could meditation be useful for this?
Sounds like this would still run into the problem I anticipate and be hindered by poor innate memory and pattern matching abilities or low conscientiousness. Some people just won't recognize the situation even in retrospect or have already forgotten about it.
Here's an example of what a less than ideal teaching scenario might look like. If MIT graduates are one end of the spectrum, that's close to the another, and most people are going to be somewhere in between.
Meditation is definitely one of the more interesting self-improvement techniques where you basically just follow an algorithm. Still, it probably won't increase your innate g, much like nothing else seems to. And there are some not entirely healthy subcultures around extensive meditation practices (detachment from the physical world as in "the only difference between an ideal monk and a corpse is that the monk still has a beating heart" and so on), which might be trouble for someone who really wants an algorithm to follow and grabs on to meditation without having much of a counterweight in their worldview.
"There exists no rationality curriculum such that a person of average IQ can benefit from it" and "there exists no rationality curriculum such that a person of LW-typical IQ can benefit from it" are not the same statement.
shrug It sounds as though you want a rationality curriculum to fail, given that you are brainstorming this kind of creative failure mode.
I want to believe that the rationality curriculum will fail iff it is the case that the rationality curriculum will fail.
Upvoted because I disagree with the implicit assumption that the best way of teaching rationality-as-winning would look like heuristics and biases scholarship, rather than teaching charisma, networking, action, signaling strategies, and how to stop thinking.
No, I'm saying it's another failure mode for producing general awesomeness, but at least it might produce some useful scholarship.
EDIT: I also don't think that your description would go very far, it'd still end up with the innately clever people dominating, and the rest just stuck in the general arms race and the confusion of actually effectively applying the skills to the real world, just like all the self-help we already have that teaches that stuff seems to end up.
What's the difference?