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Viliam comments on Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 27 July 2015 07:16AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 27 July 2015 02:42:56PM *  6 points [-]

There's been far less writings on improving rationality here on LW during the last few years. Has everything important been said about the subject, or have you just given up on trying to improve your rationality? Are there diminishing returns on improving rationality? Is it related to the fact that it's very hard to get rid off most of cognitive bias, no matter how hard you try to focus on them? Or have people moved talking about these on different forums, or in real life?

Or like Yvain said on 2014 Survey results.

It looks to me like everyone was horrendously underconfident on all the easy questions, and horrendously overconfident on all the hard questions. To give an example of how horrendous, people who were 50% sure of their answers to question 10 got it right only 13% of the time; people who were 100% sure only got it right 44% of the time. Obviously those numbers should be 50% and 100% respectively.

This builds upon results from previous surveys in which your calibration was also horrible. This is not a human universal - people who put even a small amount of training into calibration can become very well calibrated very quickly. This is a sign that most Less Wrongers continue to neglect the very basics of rationality and are incapable of judging how much evidence they have on a given issue. Veterans of the site do no better than newbies on this measure.

Comment author: Viliam 28 July 2015 09:09:25AM 4 points [-]

1) There are diminishing returns on talking about improving rationality.

2) Becoming more rational could make you spend less time online, including on LessWrong. (The time you would have spent in the past writing beautiful and highly upvoted blog articles is now spent making money or doing science.) Note: This argument is not true if building a stronger rationalist community would generate more good than whatever you are doing alone instead. However, there may be a problem with capturing the generated value. (Eliezer indirectly gets paid for having published on LessWrong. But most of the others don't.)