Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Perhaps it would be best to learn from psychology. Psychology has shown that there's very little you can do to make yourself 'more rational.' Knowing about biases does little to prevent them from happening, and you can't force yourself to enjoy something you don't enjoy. Further, it takes a lot of conscious, slow effort to be rational. In the face of real-life problems, true rationality is often pretty much impossible as it would take more computing power than available in the universe. It's pretty clear that our irrationality is a mechanism to cope with the information overload of the real world by making approximate guesses.

It's because of things like this that I think maybe LW has gone severely overboard with the instrumental rationality thing. Note that knowing about biases is a noble goal that we should strive towards, but trying to fix them often backfires. The best we can usually hope for is to try to identify biases in our thinking and other people's.

But anyway, a lot of the issues of this site could simply be a matter of technical fixes. It was never really a good idea to base a rationality forum on a reddit template. Instead of the 'everyone gets to vote' system, I prefer the system where there are a handful of moderators. Moderators could be selected by the community and they would not be allowed to moderate discussions they themselves are participating in. This is the system that slashdot follows and I think it seems to work extremely well.

4Shmi12y

This particular point is demonstrably false, at least as a general one: people acquire taste for foods and activities they previously disliked all the time. [...] There are plenty of (anecdotal) examples to the contrary. I find myself thinking something like "am I being biased in assuming..." all the time, now that I have been on this forum for years. I heard similar sentiments from others, as well. [...] That's true enough. But it is also true in general for almost every System 2-type activity (like learning to drive), until it gets internalized in System 1. [...] Indeed it is impossible to get a perfectly optimal solution, and one of the biases is the proverbial "analysis paralysis", where an excuse for doing nothing is that anything you do is suboptimal. However, an essential part of being instrumentally rational is figuring out the right amount of computing power to dedicate to a particular problem before acting. [...] Indeed a different template could have worked better. Who knows. However, a decision had to be made within the time and budget constraints, and, while suboptimal, it was good enough to let the site thrive. See above about bounded rationality. [...] Except Reddit is clearly winning, in the "rationalists must win" sense, and Slashdot has all but disappeared, or at least has been severely marginalized compared to its late 90s heydays .

3Viliam_Bur12y

Perhaps "force" isn't the right approach (and the whole "willpower" is just a red herring). But don't we have many examples where people changed their emotions because of an external influence? Charismatic people can motivate others. People sometimes like something because their friends like it. Conditioning. I believe with a strategic approach people can make themselves enjoy something more. It may not be fast or 100% reliable or sufficiently cheap, but there is a way. A rational person should try finding the best way to enjoy something, if enjoying that thing is desirable. (For example, people from Vienna meetup are going to gym together after the next meetup, so they can convert enjoying a rationalist community into enjoying exercise.)

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