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The other side of this is to try to be aware if people are trying to load up your mind with fake experiences to influence your intuition.
In response to
Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win
This can actually be done unintentionally as well. One of the things that might have caused the original haunted rationalist problem could have been watching/reading too much horror fiction: if most experiences you've seen regarding an old house end up with people tortured and dead, even if you know they were all known to be fictitious, you will still anticipate, however strongly, bad things happening in old houses. This also makes me wary that my anticipations regarding the future are likely highly influenced by all the science fiction I read, so I know to watch my aliefs in that regard very very closely.
In response to
Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win
Want to alieve snakes are generally not dangerous?
No! Those things can kill you! Perhaps I am safe here in Berkeley for the next month or so but back home I expect most of the snakes I encounter to be capable of killing me if they bite me. They aren't particularly likely to bite me unless I touch them, corner them or stand on them - that's where the fear comes in handy. It makes me feel uncomfortable when walking through long grass, particularly when wearing light footwear. That way I at least pay attention to movements and sounds and so give the snake a chance to move out of the way before I run on him.
This example was intended as a possible alief you might want to hold, whether it is accurate to your beliefs or not. There are some people who can reasonably expect to never encounter a dangerous snake in the wild who are nonetheless very afraid of them (and all other snakes as well); while respect and fear for dangerous and potentially poisonous animals is worthwhile for some, for others it can be a handicap.
I should also mention (though I took this part out of the article) that there are some situations where one might want to alieve things entirely counter to ones beliefs. The technique allows for cultivation of these types of aliefs as well, and not fearing snakes might be one of them. Other examples could be the alief that cake is not delicious, or that drinking/being drunk is boring and often painful. Note that I do not personally advocate lying to oneself in an overly convincing manner, as that way darkness lies.
In response to
Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win
You mean alieve, not believe. This is a technique to alieve what you already believe.
Fixed.
Not that being right means you're necessarily not uninformed, ignorant, or in denial. And being right is probably positively correlated with being a jerk, as most people measure things.
True. I was actually considering omitting the last sentence, as it doesn't really contribute much, but I wasn't sure if that would have been misleading as to the original meaning.
In response to
Rationality Quotes July 2011
In response to
An Outside View on Less Wrong's Advice
It would be really convenient if rationality, the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in, also happened to be the best for winning at life.
As I've seen it used here, "rationality" most commonly refers to "the best [memecluster] for winning at life" whatever that actual memecluster may be. If it could be shown that believing in the christian god uniformly improved or did not affect every aspect of believers lives regardless of any other beliefs held, I think a majority of lesswrongers would take every effort necessary to actually believe in a christian god. The problem seems to be how rationality and "the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in" are equated- these two are currently very similar memeclusters for the current lesswrong demographic, but they are not necessarily so. "It would be really convenient if the meme-cluster that we most enjoy and are best-equipped to participate in, also happened to be the best for winning at life, rationality." seems more sensical.
In response to
Meetup : Southern Arizona meetup
So, due to bad luck, bad timing, and lack of proper foresight, it seems this attempt was a total bust(well, not total, I got some work done). I'll try another one sometime this month. Any feedback would be helpful.
In response to
Meetup : Southern Arizona meetup
I had a bit of car trouble, but I managed to get here get my coffee and the wifi password, and then realize I forgot a sign or anything of the kind. I'm sitting in the corner near the register if anybody happens to be waiting
I'm wearing a dark red shirt and jeans and typing on a white laptop if that helps.
In response to
Meetup : Southern Arizona meetup
I had a bit of car trouble, but I managed to get here get my coffee and the wifi password, and then realize I forgot a sign or anything of the kind. I'm sitting in the corner near the register if anybody happens to be waiting
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Hmm. My brain seems to do somehting very similar automatically, and I can't think of any clear problems that I have of this type (at the moment, it dosn't necessarily mean there ain't any). There is the possibility that some other less positive factor causes my abnormally high apparent alif-belif correlation thou. Still, figuring out what I did to acquire this habit might still be useful to others.
Do you read/watch a lot of fiction? I personally end up selecting for fiction which matches my beliefs somewhat closely, and that in retrospect has likely strongly enforced the connection. This seems like a reasonable candidate for an automatic yet unnoticeable process with those results.