= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kaj_Sotala comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (117)
How about habits and norms like:
(more)
It feels like it would be possible to get ordinary people to adopt at least some of these, and that their adoption would actually increase the general level of rationality.
I'm skeptical that these kinds of habits and norms can actually be successfully installed in ordinary people. I think they would get distorted for various reasons:
The hard part of using the first habit is figuring out what constitutes strong evidence. You can always rationalize to yourself that some piece of evidence is actually weak if you don't feel, on a gut level, like knowing the truth is more important than winning arguments.
There are several hard parts of using the second habit, like not getting addicted to gambling. Also, when people with inaccurate beliefs are consistently getting swindled by people with accurate beliefs, you're training the former to stop accepting bets, not to update their beliefs. This might still be useful for weeding out bad pundits, but then the pundit community doesn't actually have an incentive to adopt this habit.
The hard part of using the third habit is remembering what facts led you to your conclusion. Also, you can always cherrypick.
And so forth. These are all barriers I expect people with high IQ to deal with better than people with average IQ.
You're probably right, but even distorted versions of the habits could be more useful than not having any at all, especially if the high-IQ people were more likely to actually follow their "correct" versions. Of course, there's the possibility of some of the distorted versions being bad enough to make the habits into net negatives.