All this stuff about "Something to Protect" and "Rationalists Should Win" is all nice and well. And Eliezer's point that grounding rationalism in some real-world need ensures that we don't enter affective death spirals around some particular less-than-optimal rational method, is well-taken.
But dammit, truth for the sake of truth is okay too!
I want to know how to become better at certain things, but that's not the main reason I'm on here. Have you ever had all the wires connected to your computer all tangled up, and it's not really making anything that much harder to use, but it just gets on your nerves until you have to stop what you're doing and spend however long it takes trying to untangle all of them and put them in nice little lines? That's how my brain feels all the time. Reading Overcoming Bias helped me untangle some of those wires.
Of course, if I didn't then take advantage of my new clarity to advance some of my other values, you'd have to wonder whether I'd really learned anything. But that wasn't the main reason I came here, and it's not the main reason I stay.
...and judging by how much time people here spend on Newcomb-like problems, then unless you...
Truth isn't something you feel is true.
Programming abounds with theories that give their adherents a sense of clarity - for example the relational model of data, or object-oriented design, or REST. Funny that all those theories have active "evangelists". My experience with them all had a pattern of initial "wow" followed much later by a painful un-clarification, as contact with the real world brought out the theory's shortcomings. Curiously, my experience with Overcoming Bias has followed the same pattern: I bought into the ideas wholesale for the first months, then slowly grew disillusioned over about a year. Today it's all the same old same old. The idea of correcting cognitive biases just isn't as powerful by itself as we like to think. Hence my post.
Don't get stuck in the box an ideology outlines for you. It may be a good fit today but you'll hopefully grow.
Re PS: if rationality had no other real-world uses except business success, and in that single area hairstyle proved to be a greater contributor, then yes, I'd leave and never look back.
And yet Newton didn't develop the theory of gravitation as part of his quest to make cheaper widgets. Nor did Einstein develop relativity because there was anything practical that classical mechanics couldn't do.
Looking for truth is not a fancy way of saying "looking for the first half-assed solution you can find so you can feel like you know something true and go back to what you were doing before."
The easiest way to get a bundle of beliefs that completely dissolve previously mysterious questions, don't contradict one another, don't contradict experience, don't contain sacred mysteries, and don't force you into dark side epistemology to maintain them - as far as I know the easiest way to get such beliefs is to believe things that are true.
If there's some other weird attractor state of beliefs that also fulfills those requirements, I guess I risk falling into it. But then again, so do you - such beliefs would have to predict experience as successfully as the truth, which means they would have to give you the same widget-making capacity as true beliefs.
Despite starting out at Less Wrong as a believer in the "rationalism helps you win!" school, the more I read the less I think going from the sort of person who's read all of Overcoming Bias to the sort of person who's read OB plus all of Less Wrong is going to grant you any hugely significant extra real-world-winning capacity. I should make a post on this sometime.
Never mind widgets. I overemphasized business in the original post. Any kind of reality check will do. Newton had a reality check, what about us? Not many accurate predictions here. Choose any real-world metric that suits you - just don't degenerate into "what biases have you overcome today" soft-science bullshit.
I once joked that science has four levels, high to low: "this works", "this is true", "this sounds true", "this sounds neat". We here are still at number three, no?
Ob has changed people's practical lives in some major ways. Not all of these are mine personally:
"I donated more money to anti aging, risk reduction, etc"
"I signed up for cryonics."
"I wear a seatbelt in a taxi even when no one else does."
"I stopped going to church but started hanging out socially with aspiring rationalists."
"I decided rationality works and started writing down my goals and pathways to them."
"I decided it's important for me to think carefully about what my ultimate values are."
I am reading Less Wrong at 1AM even though I need to get up in the morning. Rationally, I would get better return on my time from sleeping. Rationally, it's pretty clear that, wrt my major goals of managing my life and my job, Less Wrong is more of a hazard than a potential benefit, as the time I spend on it it has often had a considerable negative impact on me. So I'm using Less Wrong to help me be irrational and lose. :P
No, feelings won't do. If feelings turn you on, do drugs or get religious. Rationalism needs to verifiably bring external benefit.
I couldn't disagree more. Since becoming a rationalist my repertoire of feelings has measurably improved. I'm now capable of being delighted by things that wouldn't have interested me a few months ago. In certain situations I used to feel an overwhelming, paralyzing fear that rationality has cured me of. This is a huge verifiable, external benefit for me.
Since becoming a rationalist, my job performance has improved, and I spend twice as much time (yes, I've kept track) doing the things I've always wanted to, but was previously kept from doing by akrasia or poor time management. I don't know if that's as "awesome" as a martial art, but I definitely consider it a WIN.
If anyone's interested, the four major influences on my rationalism are Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Moshe Feldenkrais's writing on body awareness, P.J. Eby's mind hacking techniques, and OB/LW.
I developed my Art in the course of trying intensely to untangle deep confusions and answer wrong questions. If you are trying to do something similar, then I should think and hope that reading through all my reams of advice will be a HUGE win.
Does it have other applications? Oh, some of it does, I should rather think. The art of clear thinking is inherently less specialized than, say, welding.
But my Art of rationality is confessedly incomplete, a strong punch without a hint of kicking. I have not been trying with all my strength to live a happy everyd...
I'm not like Eliezer, I don't seek to be right because I have some beautiful vision of the future I have to actualize. I'm not as smart as him, and I lack his willpower. I only seek to be right because I hate being wrong. Which means that for my purposes drugs are unproductive and religion is counterproductive.
Your postscript raises an interesting point. I strongly suspect that readers here can have a much greater impact on their real world success by improving arational traits like charisma and physical appearance than by continuing to strive for marginal gains in what are likely to be already-high levels of rationality. At the very least, it seems uncontroversial to say that these traits play a huge role in one's real world success. If we assume, then, that "real world success" is a rational objective, why isn't everyone here hitting the gym daily, working to improve their fashion sense, and enrolling in acting classes to improve social finesse?
Is there some further bias we can eliminate that will enable us to drag our asses to the gym even when we're feeling completely exhausted?
Yes, several. Unfortunately, the exact list is usually different from one person to the next. Here are a few I've had to get rid of:
This is less than a third of the full list, it's just the ones that come to mind right off... and I'm not really done yet, either. I lost 27 pounds last year, and expect to do a similar amount this year, but my actual habit of exercising is still pretty erratic, due to another bias which I only just eliminated. (Still too soon to tell what impact it's going to have.)
To be honest, I was already pretty rational! OCB and LW have helped me clarify many of the reasons I behave as I do, and clarified why I don't understand why others do the things they do (or sometimes why I do things that I don't understand).
Even if rationalism didn't bring real-world victories, I don't agree that there's no point. There's any number of scientific endeavors that I understand, or would like to understand, that don't lead me to anything other than ... understanding.
"Does LessWrong make us WIN?"
Rationality is at least partly about questioning - and possibly changing - our preconceptions of what 'winning' means.
Once this is acknowledged, your question becomes a very complicated one.
No, feelings won't do. If feelings turn you on, do drugs or get religious.
Most drugs that have large, noticeable positive effects on mood (cocaine, amphetamines, opiates, MDMA, etc.) are expensive, risky to acquire, and become less effective over time as the body's feedback systems adjust to compensate for the presence of the drug. Most commonly prescribed psychiatric medications (Prozac, etc.) have only small, minor effects.
If one has six months to live, spending it doing cocaine and heroin is a reasonable way to maximize personal pleasure, but if you don't plan on dying any time soon, their long-term effects make them a bad deal even from a pure hedonistic perspective.
As Eliezer's Quantum Physics sequence showed, Rationality can go a long a way in helping scientist get to the better theories faster. Which helps mankind WIN, which helps the individual scientists who worked on the theories WIN etc etc. A very practical benefit of Rationality.
Robin wrote how being rational can harm you. Let's look at the other side: what significant benefits does rationality give?
The community here seems to agree that rationality is beneficial. Well, obviously people need common sense to survive, but does an additional dose of LessWrong-style rationality help us appreciably in our personal and communal endeavors?
Does LessWrong make us WIN?
(If we don't WIN, our evangelism rings a little hollow. Science didn't spread due to evangelism, science spread because it works. Art spreads because people love it. I want to hold my Art to this standard. Push-selling a solution while it's still inferior might be the locally optimal decision but it corrupts long-term, as many of us have seen in the IT industry. That's if the example of all religions and political movements isn't enough for you. Beware the Evangelism Death Spiral!)
We may claim internal benefits such as improved clarity of thought from each new blog insight. But religious people claim similar internal benefits that actually spill out into the measurable world, such as happiness and charitability. This fact gives us envy and we attempt to use our internal changes to group together for world-benefitting tasks. To my mind this looks like putting the cart before the horse: why compete with religion on its terms, don't we have utility functions of our own to satisfy?
No, feelings won't do. If feelings turn you on, do drugs or get religious. Rationalism needs to verifiably bring external benefit. Don't help me become pure from racism or somesuch. Help me WIN, and the world will beat a path to our door.
Okay, interpersonal relationships are out. Then the most obvious area where rationalism could help is business. And the most obvious community-beneficial application (riffing on some recent posts here) would be scientists banding together and making a profitable part-time business to fund their own research. I can see how many techniques taught here could help, e.g. PD cooperation techniques. If a "rationalism case study" of this sort ever gets launched, I for one will gladly offer my effort. Of course this is just one suggestion; everything's possible.
One thing's definite for me: rationalism needs to be grounded in real-world victories for each one of us. Otherwise what's the point?