Why aren’t there dojos that teach rationality?
―The Martial Art of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

For the last 6 months, I've been running a dojo that teaches rationality.

Why

I was at an ACX meetup and met an acolyte who grew up in an evangelical Christian community. He had recently discovered the Sequences and was really excited about this whole Rationality thing. He was very confident in Yudkowsky's teachings.

I asked him a couple questions and he realized his beliefs were full of holes. He wondered how he could have understood so little. After all, he had read all of Yudkowsky's Sequences.

"I have read 100 books about chess," I said, "Surely I must be a grandmaster by now."

At that moment, he was enlightened.

The problem

The objective of rationality is to become right instead of wrong. Being wrong feels exactly like being right. We are not aware of our own biases. We are not aware of our own mistakes. We are not aware of the lies we tell ourselves. This is almost a tautology.

Other people are not tautologically blind to our mistakes in the same way. The simplest way to become less wrong is to have someone else point out your mistakes to you. Except this doesn't actually work. If I say "I'm right," and you say "you're wrong", then we get nowhere. The more we argue, the more frustrated we get.

The solution

There is a better way. I call it rhetorical aikido. Rhetorical aikido is a Daoist form of Socratic dialogue. The simplest form of rhetorical aikido has three steps:

You let someone confidently state a belief $A$ that you know is wrong.
You let that same someone confidently state a belief $B$ that contradicts $A$ .
You let them notice that $A$ contradicts $B$ .

Examples:
[I'm the guy in the dark green chair on your right.]

Notice that this technique follows Dale Carnegie's guidelines. You smile. You agree. You show genuine interest in the other person. You don't say "You're wrong". You never even say your own beliefs (unless asked). There's nothing for the person to get angry at because you never attacked them. Instead of criticizing, you point out errors indirectly, via a joke. You cheer them on as they dig their own grave. After all, you're trying to lose too.

Perhaps more importantly, this technique makes password-guessing impossible. You're playing the bastard offspring of chess + Calvinball. There is no password to guess.

The right conditio

...

Daoism

Daoism