We already teach the scientific method, but only as applied to the school science fair, instead of a general method for getting to a clearer view of things.

Because it's not a good method for getting a clear view of things.

So my advice: don't be a moron. Say you have no opinion. Didn't read the holy book (either your own or the enemy's religion)? No opinion. Didn't read the bill? No opinion. Read no articles from climate science journals? No opinion. Etc.

Except then your at the mercy of, at best, the people who ignore this advise, or at worst, the people who intentionally made things overly complicated in order to screw you.

For example, why can't most people read the bill? Because the bill is extremely unnecessarily long. Why is the bill extremely unnecessarily long? The better for the lobbyists to hide all the ways they're screwing you on behalf of their clients.

I appreciate this comment for many reasons, but mostly because it throws into prominence the role of different values underlying comparisons like the top post's.

I wish I had the kind of serene acceptance of other people that you seem to have, but I do not. I am inclined to blame people for not making time to research economic, social, and political policy options, since these things are so important. You're right that it takes time to learn details about which policies are good and which are not, but there are many other factors besides knowledge that are relevant to sustained disagreement. For example, it's not a matter of time investment for someone to admit it when they realize they are wrong, it's essentially just a matter of integrity. Most people lack the humility to do this, however. This is repulsive to me, a mindset that values pretending to be right over actually figuring out how to help others. But this mindset is one I feel that most people possess. I strongly wish I believed otherwise, it's very unpleasant for me to half-despise so many people, but it's what my view of the facts suggests.

A good post. By the way, a common expression for what you call bubble is "echo chamber" and yes, one of the drawbacks of the internet is that it makes constructing them oh so very easy.

Your writing is good, much better than mine, even though I came up with the same idea before. Please continue writing.

There is one thing I disliked, the mentioning of “liberals” and “conservatives” as the only 2 possible political positions, 2 “sides”. You already understand the package-deal fallacy, that one who identifies as a “liberal” and supports most stereotypically “liberal” policies, might still not support all of them, or support some of the “conservative” policies.

But there are policies that you can't pigeonhole into “liberal” and “conservative”. Many policies and ideas are not even binary: there are not 2 contradictory positions, but 10 contradictory positions. Therefore even the idea of a 1-dimensional continuum of left-centre-right is fallacious.

It's also important to note that not all English-speaking Internet users are from the US. There are well-educated people who live in countries you don't even know exist. So mentioning US political trends or personalities without brief explanation is an additional obstacle to understanding. If you want your texts to be widely read by non-Americans, you should make them more general, so that they don't require local American intuitions and background knowledge.

Finally, there is a point that is rarely brought up on LW, but is very important. The reason Luke Muehlhauser is so cool, is that he raised attention to the neglected virtue of scholarship, the fact that, in some sense, there is no “royal road to science”. Strictly speaking, this is not true, some roads are definitely more effective than the others. A good textbook or study methods might accelerate your learning tenfold, hundredfold.

But at the end of they day, once you have your rationality, your effective study methods, your time-management system, your Pomodoro, your Bayesian epistemology and what not, the only way you can actually understand something on a deep level is to sit your ass on the chair and read a freaking book. Sometimes more than once, with exercises, whiteboard and discussions.

You can optimize learning and thinking, for sure, but you can't skip the dumb “hard work” part. And this leads us to the fact that we have 24 hours a day. Most people have stupid jobs, little money, kids, commitments, social status to maintain. The little free time they have they can't spend efficiently on self-education, because they are tired after work, they are stressed and anxious and have lots of psychological barriers that make them think “nah, I'm too stupid to ever learn physics on my own”. And I'm not even talking about billions of people living in complete squalor, I'm talking about people with access to the Internet and books.

A middle-aged US conservative has enough time to read one book a month. Not because he's a “stupid redneck”, but because all other time is spent raising kids, fixing his car, going to the job, inviting friends for a meal etc. So when he goes to the bookstore, he sees a nice-seeming book by Ann Coulter. He has no training in political science, so how would he ever know that the book is the waste of time? He has no point of reference, no background knowledge. One might say he buys this book to assuage his tribal evo-psych desires or because he's biased. I say he simply can't make huge inferential jumps that would make him conclude reading Ann Coulter is a waste of time.

You see, saying that someone is biased, or a product of evolution in the ancestral environment, or prone to signaling and status-oriented behavior, and so on, is just a very elaborate way of saying someone is stupid. And stupid is a grave insult. People near-universally hate stupid people, and treat them with either condescension or hostility by default. It's like we constantly trying to prove that their stupidity is their “fault”. You'd think, if somebody is stupid, that is, has not enough knowledge or mental skills to come to a right conclusion, definitely the results of their stupidity are not their fault? But that's not how people think automatically, and it takes conscious effort to rewrite this default attitude towards stupid people.

Suppose the above-mentioned US conservative somehow magically decides to buy Bill Maher's book instead. He read somewhere that it's no harm to sometimes read what your political enemies write, that even in the worst propaganda might be a grain of truth, that it's virtuous to try to learn the position you dislike and evaluate it on your own. Somehow, his cognitive, social, evo-psych forces didn't stop him from buying that book. Would he now be able to support views that are closer to the truth? Most likely not, except if slightly or by epistemic luck.

Some political positions, like gay marriage, might be a “no-brainer”. But open borders is not a “no-brainer”, and so aren't negative income tax, raising minimum wage, military interventions, increasing inflation, decreasing inflation. You need to read books for that, and think with concentration for hours, and consult various sources, and maybe write down equations, and maybe even use statistical methods. Most people literally don't have time for that.

Teaching the dangers of death spirals and how politics can be a mind-killer to everyone would make the world a much better place. But I don't even think a next-door fundamentalist Christian, trained in LW rationality, would necessarily accept evolution. Because accepting evolution is not about rational thinking, it's about actually understanding how it works. Yeah, you can also accept it without understanding, and that's what happens most of the times. I'm pretty sure most /r/atheism subscribers don't actually understand evolution's mechanism and thus aren't justified in their belief.

This is more of a request than a review. My current akrasia problems have to deal with filtering and prioritization. I have a lot of simultaneous "projects" going on. This is to say that I want to do all of them, but usually get trapped in doing busy-work like planning and budgeting and research, instead of building and execution. I switch often which makes switching costs very high.

All of my projects feel very urgent to me. But none of them get done. Thoughts?

HabitRPG: +5. Though I had to learn extra tricks to get this much out of it, like gamifying all my task and habit names, and manually setting task difficulties and reward amounts.

Activity Deadlines: +4. Set up 3-8 minute timer, depending on the task, then do as much as possible in that time limit. Point is to make it short enough you keep moving. Afterward, record success on HabitRPG, reset, repeat.

Transcranial Direct Stimulation to stimulate the frontal lobes (see http://www.trans-cranial.com/index.php/ for the device I use): +8. Twenty minutes on this in the morning, followed by pushing as hard into the most important tasks for the day for the next two or three hours. This beats most everything else ever tried for me.

Standing workstation, with fatigue mat: +3. Seems like +5 until it starts to hurt, then it becomes a distraction. Maybe better after sustained practice.

Modafinil -1: In the short term, it's as effective as five hour energy or the like, nothing really special. Eventually, started interfering with sleep and becoming a net negative.

Blend Pramiracetam, Centrophenoxine, Sulbutiamine +6: Have only used them in combination, so can only comment on them in combination. High clarity, memory, etc. Can help with akrasia caused by mental fogging.

Take an Apprentice +7: Have taken in 3 apprentices (for software engineering). Getting them to the level of complete mastery I have promised them drives me very hard to push myself and be a perfect example.

Here's a method for learning a complex subject that seems to accelerate acquiring instrumental skill and the ability to use the knowledge creatively. As a bonus, you make progress on projects you've deferred for want of technical skills you're learning now.

Project Mapping: a) Make a list of projects you're working or intend to do sometime. The more the projects excite you, the more effective this technique. b) Take a bite of your subject (a chapter or topic, smaller the better) c) Go to your project journal. Pick one or more projects from the list to connect to the material you learned. If they can't conceivably connect ... then why are you learning this? d) No matter how great the gap between the complexity and difficulty of your project and the simplicity of the elementary material you just learned, even if it's just whole number addition, describe ways to apply the knowledge to some aspect or part of your project. This is the actual "secret sauce" of the technique. e) Return to each bite to "rehearse" it by adding even more ideas, and feel free to connect in and use more advanced material you've learned, too. f) If you can, set your rehearsal schedule for each bite to initially just half an hour apart, but space them out by double the previous time between rehearsals. Force even boundaries on days or weeks to help simplify the schedule. Something like: 30m, 60m, 2h, 4h, 8h, 16h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 7d, 2w, 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 1y

A note on the "secret sauce" (part d): You'll often need to force your brain to believe, especially when learning the fundamentals of a subject, that you can apply it to your byzantine mega-idea. Try for five minutes. If it's just too hard, maybe create an easier project to stand-in.