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katydee comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - LessWrong
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When it comes to raising the sanity waterline, I can't help but think that the intelligence issue is likely to be a paper tiger. In fact I think LessWrong as a whole cares far too much about unusually intelligent people and that this is one of the biggest flaws of the community as a general-interest project. However, I also recognize that multiple purposes are at work here and such goal conflict may be inevitable.
Can you elaborate on this? I think intelligence is a really important component of rationality in practice (although by "unusually intelligent" you might mean a higher number of standard deviations above the mean than I do).
Sure. Most rationality "in the wild" appears to be tacit rationality and building good habits, and I don't think that intelligence is particularly important for that. I would definitely predict, for instance, that rationality training could be accessible to people with IQs 0-1 standard deviations above the mean.
I agree that this kind of rationality exists, but I think it tends to be domain-specific and suffer from transfer issues, and I'm also skeptical that it's easily teachable.
I agree on all points, but I don't see strong evidence for an easily teachable form of general rationality either, regardless of how intelligent the audience may be.
One other issue is that most people who have currently worked on developing rationality are themselves very intelligent. This sounds like it wouldn't particularly be a problem-- but as Eliezer wrote in My Way:
Intelligence definitely strikes me as one of those unusual features.
Perhaps it could be said that current rationality practices, designed by the highly intelligent and largely practiced by the same, require high intelligence, but it nevertheless seems far from clear that all rationality practices require high intelligence.
Fair point.