Rationality is a lot like grammar: it's good to have for any job, everybody learns most of what they'll ever learn as kids, and you lose it when you drink. The main difference is that people don't think of it as something to be learned.
As money-making operations go, there are quite a few that teach rationality without calling it that. QA and troubleshooting are both huge IT sectors that are entirely about applied rationality, and if you can prove that your rationality program benefits those organizations, you will get work from IT managers.
Of course, it all gets into careful opponent analysis then, which makes the whole exercise quite fuzzy and into "well, Tom really hates the new guy, so he'll probably vote no because he's ornery" territory. All the directors are basing their decisions on the decisions of each other, since there is no reward for acting alone. Again, a second confederate in the beginning makes all the difference.
...Your lackey proposes as follows: “I move that we vote upon the following: that if this motion passes unanimously, all members of the of the Board resign immediately and are given a reasonable compensation; that if this motion passes 4-1 that the Director who voted against it must retire without compensation, and the four directors who voted in favor may stay on the Board; and that if the motion passes 3-2, then the two 'no' voters get no compensation and the three 'yes' voters may remain on the board and will also get a spectacular prize - to wit, our com
This seems much like the Prisoners' Dilemma. Yes, you can avoid it easily if you can talk beforehand and trust everyone to go through with their precommitments. If you can't talk or you don't trust what they say, then it's much harder to avoid. After all, if the first two directors cooperated with the plan by voting no, then the second two directors would have a very high incentive to defect and vote yes.
In practice people are usually able to solve these for much the same reasons they can usually solve prisoners' dilemmas - things like altruism and reputational penalties.
"Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it's only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?" -Timothy Keller
This is so laden with assumptions that are not substantiated t...
I don't buy that lying requires believing the lies even a little bit. Internalization may be important, but understanding religious thought and being able to speak about it convincingly doesn't require belief by any means.
It seems transparent that bad liars are exhibiting stress tics rather than trying to protect their internal narrative given the techniques for becoming a better liar (i.e. relax, practice, be confident) and the similarity to nervous people telling the truth when they're worried they'll get in trouble for it anyways (in the face of interrogation, for instance).
I had this problem for a long time, which can be embarrassing doing phone support, especially one with frequent callers that know my name and voice (one of only two men and we have distinct voices and greetings). I started intentionally using callers name's three times in every call and reaped several benefits: 1) I actually remember their names when they call back, 2) I'm better at remembering names having been told only once (even outside of work), and 3) my customer satisfaction scores had a marked and sustained increase.
Apparently, the correction was in the form of altering essay and story questions to de-emphasize sports and business and ask more about arts and humanities. This hasn't been terribly effective. The gap is smaller in the verbal sections, but it's still there. Given that the entire purpose of the test is to predict college grades directly and women do better in college than men, explanations and theories abound.
Of course, if you use IQ testing, it is specifically calibrated to remove/minimize gender bias (so is the SAT and ACT), and intelligence testing is horribly fraught with infighting and moving targets.
I can't find any research that doesn't at least mention that social factors likely poison any experimental result. It doesn't help any that "intelligence" is poorly defined and thus difficult to quantify.
Considering that men are more susceptible to critical genetic failure, maybe the mean is higher for men on some tests because the low outliers had defects that made them impossible to test (such as being stillborn)?
You'd have to raise the bar really far before any actual gender-based differences showed up. It seems far more likely that the cause is a cultural bias against intellectualism in women (women will under-report IQ by 5ish points and men over-report by a similar margin, women are poorly represented in "smart" jobs, etc.). That makes women present themselves as less intelligent and makes everyone perceive them as less intelligent.
"Rationalists should win," mathematical tautology. Perfectly rational bayesian expected utility maximizers do just that. As humans, it is a good heuristic to avoid privileged rituals of thought.
There can be value in tautology for the purpose of drawing attention to an important point: "oh, I'm not winning, I am not a rationalist, then."
Specifically, her non-fiction work (if you find that sort of thing palatable) provides a lot more concrete discussion of her philosophy.
Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is little too... abrasive... for many people who don't agree entirely with her. She has a lot of resonant points that get rejected because of all the other stuff she presents along with it.
It is particularly not rational to ignore the effect of your unconscious in your relationships. That fight is a losing battle (right now), so if having happy relationships is a goal, the pursuit of that requires you pay attention.
There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well. Greater chromosomal genetic variations in men lead to stupidity as often as intelligence.
Really, this gender disparity only matters at far extremes. Men may pad out the top and bottom 1% (or something like that) in IQ, but applied mathematicians aren...
Hello! I'm David.
I'm 26 (at the time of writing), male, and an IT professional. I have three (soon to be four) children, three (but not four) of which have a different dad.
My immediate links here were through the Singularity Institute and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which drove me here when I realized the connection (I came to those things entirely separately!). When I came across this site, I had read through the Wikipedia list of biases several times over the course of years, come to many conscious conclusions about the fragility of my ...
I woke up one time with both arms completely numb. I tried to turn the light on and instead fell out of bed. I felt certain that I was going to die right then.