The final sequence of Eliezer Yudkowsky's two-year-long string of daily posts to Less Wrong, on improving the art of rationality and building communities of rationalists.
This page is copied directly from The Craft and the Community:
This sequence ran from March to April of 2009 and dealt with the topic of building rationalist communities that could systematically improve on the art, craft, and science of human rationality. This is a highly forward-looking sequence - not so much an immediately complete recipe, as a list of action items and warnings for anyone setting out in the future to build a craft and a community.
- Raising the Sanity Waterline: Behind every particular failure of social rationality is a larger and more general failure of social rationality; even if all religious content were deleted tomorrow from all human minds, the larger failures that permit religion would still be present. Religion may serve the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine - getting rid of the canary doesn't get rid of the gas. Even a complete social victory for atheism would only be the beginning of the real work of rationalists. What could you teach people without ever explicitly mentioning religion, that would raise their general epistemic waterline to the point that religion went underwater?
- A Sense That More Is Possible: The art of human rationality may have not been much developed because its practitioners lack a sense that vastly more is possible. The level of expertise that most rationalists strive to develop is not on a par with the skills of a professional mathematician - more like that of a strong casual amateur. Self-proclaimed "rationalists" don't seem to get huge amounts of personal mileage out of their craft, and no one sees a problem with this. Yet rationalists get less systematic training in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.
- Epistemic Viciousness: An essay by Gillian Russell on "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts" generalizes amazingly to possible and actual problems with building a community around rationality. Most notably the extreme dangers associated with "data poverty" - the difficulty of testing the skills in the real world. But also such factors as the sacredness of the dojo, the investment in teachings long-practiced, the difficulty of book learning that leads into the need to trust a teacher, deference to historical masters, and above all, living in data poverty while continuing to act as if the luxury of trust is possible.
- Schools Proliferating Without Evidence: The branching schools of "psychotherapy", another domain in which experimental verification was weak (nonexistent, actually), show that an aspiring craft lives or dies by the degree to which it can be tested in the real world. In
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The Craft and the Community is the final sequence of Eliezer Yudkowsky's two-year-long string of daily posts to Less Wrong, on improving the art of rationality and building communities of rationalists.