you can't force yourself to enjoy something you don't enjoy
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.
Knowing about biases does little to prevent them from happening
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.
it takes a lot of conscious, slow effort to be rational
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.
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.
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.
a lot of the issues of this site could simply be a matter of technical fixes
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.
This is the system that slashdot follows and I think it seems to work extremely well.
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 .
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.
I've done this a lot. Each time I did, it wasn't because I forced myself, it was because I saw some new attractive thing in those foods or activities that I didn't see before. Perception and enjoyment aren't constant. People are more likely to try new activities when they are in a good mood (for instance). Mood alters perception. In that sense I actually agree with Villiam_Bur. You can get more peopl...
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