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Designing Rationalist Projects

Related to: Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Building Rationalist Communities overview, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves My thesis: > It doesn’t matter what ideas are conveyed on Less Wrong, or in LW meetings -- the subset that matters is what group members resolved to do. Discussion of these 'resolves', and people's experience doing them, is useful in creating an expectation that people level up their skills. Intelligent discussion of ideas is always refreshing. But translating that into action is more difficult. Our learned reflexes are deep. They need to be overridden. How? Practice. One woman I taught in India, we’ll call her Girija, was 35 years old, extremely intelligent and really wanted to change her life but had incredibly low levels of self-confidence. Every time we met Girija, we’d have a really sharp discussion, followed by her pouring her heart out to us. It was the same every time, and though we enjoyed the visits, and the food she would feed us, she never seemed to be getting anywhere. If she really wanted to fundamentally change her life, our weekly meetings weren’t enough. (Similarly, weekly meetups are a good start, but if you really want to be learning rationality you should be practicing every day.) We felt that if Girija spent some time every day with her 9 year old daughter and live-in boyfriend, reading the scriptures together, they would be happier. We explained this to her frequently, and she said she would start -- but she never did it. One week, through cleverly calling Girija and chatting for 10 minutes every day, we got her to do it. After the week was over, we asked her how it went. “You know, it was really good,” she said. “Sandeep and I have been getting along a lot better this week because we did that.” It was like a light had turned on in her head. Because we followed up, she did it, and was far more motivated to do more things afterwards.[1] Let me give two simple examples of goal, proje

41May 12, 2011

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Want to be on TV?

We received the following email, so figured I'd pass it along here. You can say you heard about it from Sam Bhagwat at Blueseed. Could be free publicity (alert startupers!), but I make no claims as to quality or anything else. ----- Subject: Improving the Portrayal of Nerds on TV...

Mar 26, 201311

Post-college: changing nature of friend interactions

As a working professional a couple of years out college, I’ve been noticing how interactions with my friends has changed since the beginning of college – and especially since graduation. In college, my social groups typically formed around groups with common meeting places -- freshman dorm, newspaper, church, “draw group”...

Jan 9, 201327

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example

Background info: a splinter group, which broke off from the LDS ("Mormon") church ~100 years ago, refusing to give up polygamy, has been in the headlines over the last year; their leader was sentenced to life in prison for rape of teenage girls he took as plural wives. Deseret News,...

Dec 31, 201130

Political impasse as result of different odds ratios

Related to: Politics is the Mind-Killer Both sides seem to have a stake in the current budget supercommittee failing. Why? The NYTimes reports: > Intrade, the political futures market, currently puts the odds at just under three to one in favor of both a Republican takeover of the Senate and...

Nov 19, 20119

Planning fallacy in the NYTimes

Includes the Kahneman anecdote. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?hp This is a repeated theme by Brooks -- his book The Social Animal gives an engaging overview of much of the recent literature in psychology, including a lot of the stuff we discuss here.

Sep 16, 20117

Counting upvotes/downvotes

I've recently posted several articles in my "Building Rationalist Communities" series. Some, like "Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves" have been fairly popular, as measured by upvotes; others, like Community Roles less so. But here is a small problem: I can see my net upvotes versus downvotes, but...

Aug 7, 201119

Selecting optimal group projects and roles

Related to: Designing Rationalist Projects, Committees and Leadership As I mentioned in the above posts, Latter-day Saints communities organize committees to accomplish specific tasks, like serving the outside community or making sure new members get friends. The question is, what tasks should rationalist communities organize committees or assign individuals to...

Aug 6, 20113

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Designing Rationalist Projects

Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example

The elephant in the room, AMA

calcsam

Want to be on TV?

Post-college: changing nature of friend interactions

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example

Political impasse as result of different odds ratios

Planning fallacy in the NYTimes

Counting upvotes/downvotes

Selecting optimal group projects and roles

Designing Rationalist Projects

Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example

The elephant in the room, AMA

Want to be on TV?

Post-college: changing nature of friend interactions

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example

Political impasse as result of different odds ratios

Planning fallacy in the NYTimes

Counting upvotes/downvotes

Selecting optimal group projects and roles