Attitudes about Applied Rationality
tl;dr: within the LW community, there are many clusters of strategies to achieve rationality: doing basic exercices, using jargon, reading, partaking workshops, privileging object-level activities, and several other opinions like putting an accent on feedback loops, difficult conversations or altered states of consciousness. Epistemic status: This is a vague model to help me understand other rationalists and why some of them keep doing things I think are wrong, or suggest me to do things I think are wrong. This is not based on real data. I will update according to possible discussions in the comments. Please be critical. [Update : The term "Theory" is replaced with the term "Attitude" in the following paragraphs] Spending time in the rationalist community made me realize that there were several endeavors at reaching rationality that seemed to exist, some of which conflicted with others. This made me quite frustrated as I thought that my interpretation was the only one. The following list is an attempt at distinguishing the several approaches I've noticed, which I will call Attitudes (in lack of a better name). Of course, any rationalist will probably have elements of all attitudes at the same time. See each attitude as the claim that a particular set of elements prevails above others. Referring to one attitude usually goes on par with being fairly suspicious of others. Finally, remember that these categories are an attempt to distinguish what people are doing, not a guide about what side you should pick (if the sides exist at all). I suspect that most people end up settling on one attitude for practical reasons, more than because they have deeply thought about it at all. Basics Attitude Proponents of the Basics Attitude put a high emphasis on activities such as calibration, forecasting, lifehacks, and other fairly standard practices of epistemic and instrumental rationality. They don't see any real value in reading extensively LessWrong or going to workshop
