Review
This is an awesome and heart-warming question. Tsuyoku naritai!
In Julia Galef's book The Scout Mindset, she talks about how attitude is usually more important than knowledge.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn't automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn't help you unless you're willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that's since been corroborated by researchers, as we'll see in this book: our judgment isn't limited by knowledge nearly as much as it's limited by attitude.
It sounds like you have a great attitude. I suspect that you're a much better rationalist than you claim to be.
Some thoughts on your original question:
Well, if you want the complicated answer: four or five years ago, about when I started lurking here, I came with a good mindset, and intent on learning skills rather than rules, for precisely the reason you mention. That was right before I entered university, and I think I screwed up that bit. Got depressed, and have remained too out of it to actually use rationality to improve my life much since then. But that’s changing, and the first step is to pick up my rationality practice where I left it four years ago, when I started focusing only on reading blog p...
Broadly speaking, I'm in favor of defining Rationality as systematized winning.
To become a better rationalist, you have to have something to win (or something to protect).
So you need a goal that isn't directly "become a better rationalist". This goal could be to learn a new skill, accomplish some simple task, or literally anything else.
Some suggestions:
Attempt to complete the goal, using what you've learned. Take notes. Reflect. Get better. Iterate.
Remember, the goal is to cut the enemy; the Art is not to be studied solely in isolation.
I think this is incorrect. From Levels of Action:
...One of the most useful concepts I have learned recently is the distinction between actions which directly improve the world, and actions which indirectly improve the world.
Suppose that you go onto Mechanical Turk, open an account, and spend a hundred hours transcribing audio. At current market rates, you'd get paid around $100 for your labor. By taking this action, you have made yourself $100 wealthier. This is an example of what I'd call a Level 1 or object-level action: something that directly moves the wo
How did I not notice ‘systematized winning’ meant that? I think I actually had no clue what it meant :/ Still, sounds great! And it’s actually a big part of what I’m trying to do, but I’ve been depressed for a long while and it’s only getting better now, so I’m a bit late at that game :-)
So, I’ll have to find a goal. Even then, that sounds way easier to do in the Bay, where one supposedly has other LWers around to talk to, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem
I’ve heard good things about the Guild of the ROSE, a virtual community made by rationalists to help each other level up in practical success in everyday life. You may want to look into joining them.
They run interesting seeming workshops on a variety of subjects, most salient to me are using decision theory practically via cost-benefit analyses, teaching people how to develop their own clothing style, team community projects like making a street cleaning robot (likely misremembering specifics here, this may have been an aspirational goal of theirs) for participants’ local community, and using LLMs to automate tasks. Much of my knowledge comes from this podcast episode.
Edit: Re-listening to some parts of the podcast episode, it seems like they start talking about the guild at about 00:26:47.
To my knowledge there’s no such transcript. The podcast is small and this one was made before Whisper so at the time a transcript would be super expensive (even if you did use whisper, you’d need to pay someone to label who’s talking, which likely isn’t cheap). You can find info about their workshops on their workshops page. Probably more informative than hearing me describe a podcast I last heard over a year ago.
If your head is full of concepts but you haven't applied them, there are a few things you can start practicing - easily, right now - to begin living rationaly.
Let me know how it goes. All of these can be done on the order of minutes.
Late to the debate, so just a few notes:
Some things are way more important than others. If you are currently doing something really stupid in your life, fixing it is more important than learning a list of 1000 cognitive biases and rationality techniques.
It is much better to have 5 techniques that work for you and use them regularly, than to memorize a list of 1000 techniques and actually never use them.
Make logs. (And make them simple.) For example, if your goal is to exercise regularly, put a circle in your calendar whenever you exercise, or something like that. This gives you quick feedback whether you are actually doing things, or just lying to yourself.
Think about how you reward or punish yourself. (Read the book Don't Shoot the Dog.) Punishment, including self-punishment, is almost always the wrong approach. Why? Because you indirectly punish yourself for noticing the problem, and for trying to overcome it, which is the opposite of what you would want to do. Partial successes are a reason to celebrate! (Ancient wisdom says: "All you need is love positive reinforcement.")
Your body has a huge impact on your mind. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, getting enough sunlight, seeing your friends... are powerful (indirect) rationality techniques.
Interesting comment. You know, the weird thing is that I knew all of that long before I started implementing it (that is, quite recently). And it’s not even surprising that for the longest time I knew that avoiding bad situations, making logs, making a deliberate effort to stay healthy, and avoiding self-punishment were important, but that I hardly ever did any of it. I don’t think I quite grok fully why our brains work like that.
And now, I’m actually a little concerned that I may have taken up negative reinforcement and other such bad habits in a way where it’ll be hard to uproot them. I guess if there is good advice on that, I could probably use it.
Well…
Right now, being ‘a rationalist’ could be said to be a massive part of my identity, at least judging by the absurd amount of time I’ve spent reading posts here, or SSC/ACX, and in a few other places. Yet, I’m still a mere lurker unfamiliar with most of the local customs.
But it’s not what matters. What does is that I’m a terrible rationalist.
You see, rationality takes practice. And reading stuff on LW isn’t practice at all. If anything, it’s just a great way of filling my brain with a lot of useful concepts, and then either blame myself for not using them, or use them for something entirely unrelated to their normal purpose. Often, to make myself feel worse, and think worse.
As the saying goes, rationality is a martial art. Learning it by reading the rules, or by watching other people apply the rules, is about as effective as developing one’s muscles by watching sports on TV.
I know of the CFAR, and of various related groups, meetups for ACX readers or for other people, etc. But, apart from ACX meetups, which aren’t about being better rationalists per se, I don’t have easy access to any of those, or certainly to a general environment which welcomes this. You know, not being in the Bay Area and all.
And yet, I want to be more rational as much as anyone who’s been lurking here for five years wants it, and given how depressed I was until very recently, I probably badly need it, too.
I’m not sure what kind of answers I expect, but, like, how can I push myself to learn more, and especially to practice more, and ideally to actually use rationality to improve my life?