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This sounds awesome. I want to do this right now.
In response to
How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I'd rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.
I came here to say this, and also to say that nursing closes some doors, but it opens up others. Doctors I know often regret not becoming Nurse Practitioners, who can do almost everything doctors can do, but also get to switch fields when they want to, and get paid pretty well too.
Still, that's about the details, and your post is about the generalizations from them. I think they're pretty interesting generalizations, but mostly I just want to point people reading this to Study Hacks for a lot more conversation about how to achieve excellence in whatever field you end up in.
In response to
The problem with too many rational memes
I think that might be the source of the somebody's wrong on the internet thing.
In response to
Meetup : Portland Meetup?
me! me! I'll be there! I've wanted a meetup here for a long time, but was pretty sure nobody was here.
SPRs can be gamed much more directly than human experts. For example, imagine an SPR in place of all hiring managers. In our current place, with hiring managers, we can guess at what goes in to their decisionmaking and attempt to optimize for it, but because each manager is somewhat different, we can't know that well. A single SPR that took over for all the managers, or even a couple of very popular ones, would strongly encourage applicants to optimize for the variable most weighted in the equation. Over time this would likely decrease the value of the SPR back to that of a human expert.
This has a name in the literature, but I can't remember it at the moment. You see this problem in, for example, the current obsessive focus on GDP as the only measure of national well-being. Now that we've had that measure for some time, we're able to have countries whose GDP is improving but who suck on lots of other measures, and thus politicians who are proud of what they've done but who are hated by the people.
Yes, in some cases, this would cause us to improve the SPR to the point where it accurately reflected the qualities that go into success. But that's not a proven thing.
That said, I'd really like to see a wiki or other attempting-to-be-complete resource for finding an SPR for any particular application. Anyone got one?
In response to
Rationality Dojo
Program something.
Although I have no idea whether programming actually is suitable cross-training for rationality, surely practice at analyzing a problem and breaking it down to bite-sized abstractions and interfaces will help form good habits. Those habits should become a standard tool in your mental toolbox.
All of the members last night were professional programmers, so I'm not sure that will help us, particularly, but I do think algorithmic thinking is useful to people who don't currently have it.
In response to
Rationality Dojo
We have competing feelings in our minds, and sometimes those feelings are stronger than our "rational sides". Facing our fears might be a good exercise. Facing legitimate fears (fears where the danger is real) might be useful too, but I'm specifically thinking about irrational fears.
Fear of "monsters" a la Bloody Mary in the mirror would be a good one. (Do it).
Fear of bad luck or divine retribution. (Break a mirror, step on a crack, say the forbidden thing).
Fear of the dark in your own house. (Walk around in the dark, make it fun).
Fear of social situations. (Purposefully put yourself in situations you are uncomfortable in but that won't hurt you).
Fear of heights (Safely).
Fear of failure. (Fail at something and make no excuses).
The goal of this exercise would be to acclimate yourself to these strong emotions so that they don't override your other instincts/thinking when it is important. Part of the challenge might be identifying fears you are unaware of.
That's interesting. I'd be worried about establishing safety and about unstable mental states in unknown new members. But I'm interested in trying to make an exercise out of this.
Rationality Dojo
Last night, here in Portland (OR), some friends and I got together to try to start Rationality Dojo. We talked about it for a while and came up with exactly 4 exercises that we could readily practice:
- Play Paranoid Debating
- Play the AI-Box experiment
- Read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
- Write fanfiction in the style of #3
We also had a whole bunch of semi-formed ideas about selecting a target (happiness, health) and optimizing it a month at a time. Starting a dojo, in a time before organized martial arts, was surely incredibly difficult. I hope we can accrete exercises rather than require a single sensei to invent the majority of the discipline. So I've added a category to the wiki, and I'm asking here. Do you have ideas or refinements for exercises to fit within rationality dojo?
In response to
High Status and Stupidity: Why?
The thing I've noticed about high status people is that they're only interested in associating with other high status people. But low status people are interested in associating with high status people. So high status people seem to spend a lot of time assuming that the person who just came up to talk to them is only interested in shining in their status. So a hypothesis:
- More time defending status than low status people need to spend
- Energy spent identifying need to defend status prevents engaged interaction with many of the people who come up to them.
To test this hypothesis, I would argue that high status people are more intelligent when they are in either contexts where they only interact with high status people or contexts where no one knows they are high status than they are in contexts where they interact with low status people who know who they are.
I've seen this with people who have high community status -- they're more intelligent in communities that they're not usually members of.
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What you need to do is get really good at it so you can use biases subtly, and them make it so there's a certain chance that you get "No bias". That way, you'll find out what your real biases are.
We hope to get there. It's going to take a while, I suspect.