You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

entirelyuseless comments on Emotional tools for the beginner rationalist - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gleb_Tsipursky 09 October 2015 05:01AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (44)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Viliam 11 October 2015 10:20:44AM 1 point [-]

As a very rough intuitive model, we could divide people into three rationality stages:

  • R0 -- does not care about having true beliefs
  • R1 -- cares about having true beliefs, but does not know the rationality techniques
  • R2 -- cares about having true beliefs and knows the rationality techniques

I can imagine moving people from R1 to R2. More or less, you give then the Sequences to read, and connect them with the rationalist community. At least that is what worked for me. No idea about R0 though, and they happen to be a vast majority of the population.

(There is even the technical problem of how to most effectively find R1 people in the general population. Is there a better method than making a website and hopind that they will find it?)

Another problem is that if we succeed to make LW-style rationality more popular, we will inevitably get another group growing:

  • R3 -- does not care about having true beliefs, but learned about the rationality techniques and keywords, and uses them selectively
Comment author: entirelyuseless 11 October 2015 01:03:14PM 0 points [-]

I doubt there can literally be someone who "does not care about having true beliefs." No matter how false and irrational someone's beliefs are, he still wants those beliefs to be true, so he still wants true beliefs. What happens is this:

Some people want to believe the truth. Position X seems likely to be true. So they want to believe X.

Other people want to believe X. If X is true, that would be a reason to believe it. So they want X to be true.

The first people will be in your categories R1 and R2. The second people will be in your category R0, in the sense that what is basically motivating them is the desire to believe a concrete position, not the desire to believe the truth. But they also have the desire to believe the truth. It is just weaker than their desire to believe X.

But as you say, if someone wants something more than the truth, he wants that more than the truth. No argument is necessarily going to change his desires.