2019 Review Discussion
Cross-posted from Putanumonit where the images show up way bigger. I don't know how to make them bigger on LW.
Basketballism
Imagine that tomorrow everyone on the planet forgets the concept of training basketball skills.
The next day everyone is as good at basketball as they were the previous day, but this talent is assumed to be fixed. No one expects their performance to change over time. No one teaches basketball, although many people continue to play the game for fun.
Geneticists explain that some people are born with better hand-eye coordination and are thus able to shoot a basketball accurately. Economists explain that highly-paid NBA players have a stronger incentive to hit shots, which explains their improved performance. Psychologists note that...
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My main takeaway reading this thread is a point that I emphatically agree with:
For any given thing that you want to get good at, the thing that makes the biggest difference is practice.
You can make that practice more effective or efficient with skilled reflection and rationality (like noticing confusion, looking for more efficient ways to accomplish your goal, etc), and exercise design. But those are compliments for and not substitutes for doing the practice.
Like, rationality is not best thought of as an engine that accomplishes impressive stuff. It's more like a the skill of a good mechanic, which can take an existing engine and tune it to maximize its output.
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I don't think that's right. A lot of rationalist self-help is based on discoveries or advancements of only the past few hundred years. These include things like heuristics and biases, computer science and economics models (optimal stopping, game theory, the kelly criterion, explore vs. exploit tradeoffs, probability theory).
Furthermore, a lot of the specific weird hacks that rationality recommends have also only been invented in, or tested seriously, in the past 100 years: cryonics, implementation intentions, gratitude journaling, etc.
If someone puts in the hundreds of hours, what's the output?