Related on OB: Priming and Contamination
Related on LW: When Truth Isn't Enough

When I was a kid, I wanted to be like Mr. Spock on Star Trek.  He was smart, he could kick ass, and he usually saved the day while Kirk was too busy pontificating or womanizing.

And since Spock loved logic, I tried to learn something about it myself.  But by the time I was 13 or 14, grasping the basics of boolean algebra (from borrowed computer science textbooks), and propositional logic (through a game of "Wff'n'Proof" I picked up at a garage sale), I began to get a little dissatisfied with it.

Spock had made it seem like logic was some sort of "formidable" thing, with which you could do all kinds of awesomeness.  But real logic didn't seem to work the same way.

I mean, sure, it was neat that you could apply all these algebraic transforms and dissect things in interesting ways, but none of it seemed to go anywhere.

Logic didn't say, "thou shalt perform this sequence of transformations and thereby produce an Answer".  Instead, it said something more like, "do whatever you want, as long as it's well-formed"...  and left the very real question of what it was you wanted, as an exercise for the logician.

And it was at that point that I realized something that Spock hadn't mentioned (yet): that logic was only the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

Of course, I didn't phrase it exactly that way myself...  but I did see that logic could only be used to check things...  not to generate them.  The ideas to be checked, still had to come from somewhere.

But where?

When I was 17, in college philosophy class, I learned another limitation of logic: or more precisely, of the brains with which we do logic.

Here is a 2-hour slide presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Added 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.

To begin, here are some Fun Psychology Facts:  

People who were asked to describe a face after seeing it are worse at recognizing the same face later.

People who are asked to describe a wine after drinking it are worse at recognizing the same wine later.

People who are asked to give reasons for their preferences among a collection of jellies are worse at identifying their own preferences among those jellies.

This effect, known as Verbal Overshadowing, occurs primarily when a principally non-verbal process is disrupted by a task which involves verbalization.  The above generalizations (and Verbal Overshadowing effects more generally), do not occur among what we can term "Verbal Experts": individuals who are as good at verbalizing the relevant process as they are at doing it implicitly or automatically.  This seems like it will be very important to keep in mind when cultivating our own Rationality.

Sunlight enriched air already alive with curiosity, as dawn rose on Brennan and his fellow students in the place to which Jeffreyssai had summoned them.

They sat there and waited, the five, at the top of the great glassy crag that was sometimes called Mount Mirror, and more often simply left unnamed.  The high top and peak of the mountain, from which you could see all the lands below and seas beyond.

(Well, not all the lands below, nor seas beyond.  So far as anyone knew, there was no place in the world from which all the world was visible; nor, equivalently, any kind of vision that would see through all obstacle-horizons.  In the end it was the top only of one particular mountain: there were other peaks, and from their tops you would see other lands below; even though, in the end, it was all a single world.)

"What do you think comes next?" said Hiriwa.  Her eyes were bright, and she gazed to the far horizons like a lord.

Taji shrugged, though his own eyes were alive with anticipation.  "Jeffreyssai's last lesson doesn't have any obvious sequel that I can think of.  In fact, I think we've learned just about everything that I knew the beisutsukai masters know.  What's left, then -"

"Are the real secrets," Yin completed the thought.

Hiriwa and Taji and Yin shared a grin, among themselves.

Styrlyn wasn't smiling.  Brennan suspected rather strongly that Styrlyn was older than he had admitted.

Brennan wasn't smiling either.  He might be young, but he kept high company, and had witnesssed some of what went on behind the curtains of the world.  Secrets had their price, always, that was the barrier that made them secrets; and Brennan thought he had a good idea of what this price might be.

Previously in series:  Mandatory Secret Identities

I've noticed a serious problem in which aspiring rationalists vastly overestimate their ability to optimize other people's lives.  And I think I have some idea of how the problem arises.

You read nineteen different webpages advising you about personal improvement—productivity, dieting, saving money.  And the writers all sound bright and enthusiastic about Their Method, they tell tales of how it worked for them and promise amazing results...

But most of the advice rings so false as to not even seem worth considering.  So you sigh, mournfully pondering the wild, childish enthusiasm that people can seem to work up for just about anything, no matter how silly.  Pieces of advice #4 and #15 sound interesting, and you try them, but... they don't... quite... well, it fails miserably.  The advice was wrong, or you couldn't do it, and either way you're not any better off.

And then you read the twentieth piece of advice—or even more, you discover a twentieth method that wasn't in any of the pages—and STARS ABOVE IT ACTUALLY WORKS THIS TIME.

At long, long last you have discovered the real way, the right way, the way that actually works.  And when someone else gets into the sort of trouble you used to have—well, this time you know how to help them.  You can save them all the trouble of reading through nineteen useless pieces of advice and skip directly to the correct answer.  As an aspiring rationalist you've already learned that most people don't listen, and you usually don't bother—but this person is a friend, someone you know, someone you trust and respect to listen.

And so you put a comradely hand on their shoulder, look them straight in the eyes, and tell them how to do it.

Once upon a time, Seth Roberts took a European vacation and found that he started losing weight while drinking unfamiliar-tasting caloric fruit juices.

Now suppose Roberts had not known, and never did know, anything about metabolic set points or flavor-calorie associations—all this high-falutin' scientific experimental research that had been done on rats and occasionally humans.

He would have posted to his blog, "Gosh, everyone!  You should try these amazing fruit juices that are making me lose weight!"  And that would have been the end of it.  Some people would have tried it, it would have worked temporarily for some of them (until the flavor-calorie association kicked in) and there never would have been a Shangri-La Diet per se.

The existing Shangri-La Diet is visibly incomplete—for some people, like me, it doesn't seem to work, and there is no apparent reason for this or any logic permitting it.  But the reason why as many people have benefited as they have—the reason why there was more than just one more blog post describing a trick that seemed to work for one person and didn't work for anyone else—is that Roberts knew the experimental science that let him interpret what he was seeing, in terms of deep factors that actually did exist.

I've often had half-finished LW post ideas and crossed them off for a number of reasons, mostly they were too rough or undeveloped and I didn't feel expert enough. Other people might worry their post would be judged harshly, or feel overwhelmed, or worried about topicality, or they just want some community input before adding it.

So: this is a special sort of open thread. Please post your unfinished ideas and sketches for LW posts here as comments, if you would like constructive critique, assistance and checking from people with more expertise, etc. Just pile them in without worrying too much. Ideas can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a finished post. Both subject and presentation are on topic in replies. Bad ideas should be mined for whatever good can be found in them. Good ideas should be poked with challenges to make them stronger. No being nasty!

Related to: Individual Rationality is a Matter of Life and Death, The Benefits of Rationality, Rationality is Systematized Winning
But I finally snapped after reading: Mandatory Secret Identities

Okay, the title was for shock value. Rationality is pretty great. Just not quite as great as everyone here seems to think it is.

For this post, I will be using "extreme rationality" or "x-rationality" in the sense of "techniques and theories from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, or similar deliberate formal rationality study programs, above and beyond the standard level of rationality possessed by an intelligent science-literate person without formal rationalist training." It seems pretty uncontroversial that there are massive benefits from going from a completely irrational moron to the average intelligent person's level. I'm coining this new term so there's no temptation to confuse x-rationality with normal, lower-level rationality.

And for this post, I use "benefits" or "practical benefits" to mean anything not relating to philosophy, truth, winning debates, or a sense of personal satisfaction from understanding things better. Money, status, popularity, and scientific discovery all count.

So, what are these "benefits" of "x-rationality"?

A while back, Vladimir Nesov asked exactly that, and made a thread for people to list all of the positive effects x-rationality had on their lives. Only a handful responded, and most responses weren't very practical. Anna Salamon, one of the few people to give a really impressive list of benefits, wrote:

I'm surprised there are so few apparent gains listed. Are most people who benefited just being silent? We should expect a certain number of headache-cures, etc., just by placebo effects or coincidences of timing.

There have since been a few more people claiming practical benefits from x-rationality, but we should generally expect more people to claim benefits than to actually experience them. Anna mentions the placebo effect, and to that I would add cognitive dissonance - people spent all this time learning x-rationality, so it MUST have helped them! - and the same sort of confirmation bias that makes Christians swear that their prayers really work.

I find my personal experience in accord with the evidence from Vladimir's thread. I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines¹, I can't think of any.

Looking over history, I do not find any tendency for successful people to have made a formal study of x-rationality. This isn't entirely fair, because the discipline has expanded vastly over the past fifty years, but the basics - syllogisms, fallacies, and the like - have been around much longer. The few groups who made a concerted effort to study x-rationality didn't shoot off an unusual number of geniuses - the Korzybskians are a good example. In fact as far as I know the only follower of Korzybski to turn his ideas into a vast personal empire of fame and fortune was (ironically!) L. Ron Hubbard, who took the basic concept of techniques to purge confusions from the mind, replaced the substance with a bunch of attractive flim-flam, and founded Scientology. And like Hubbard's superstar followers, many of this century's most successful people have been notably irrational.

There seems to me to be approximately zero empirical evidence that x-rationality has a large effect on your practical success, and some anecdotal empirical evidence against it. The evidence in favor of the proposition right now seems to be its sheer obviousness. Rationality is the study of knowing the truth and making good decisions. How the heck could knowing more than everyone else and making better decisions than them not make you more successful?!?

This is a difficult question, but I think it has an answer. A complex, multifactorial answer, but an answer.