They would study logic, probability theory, argument, scientific method, and other core tools of truth-seeking. They would inquire into epistemology, the study of knowing. They would study artificial intelligence to learn the algorithms, the math, the laws of how an ideal agent would acquire true beliefs. They would study modern psychology and neuroscience to learn how their brain acquires beliefs, and how those processes depart from ideal truth-seeking processes. And they would study how to minimize their thinking errors.

Not necessarily. Hindsight bias is likely at work here. You know that studying these fields helped you to acquire better beliefs, and so you conclude that this consequence should be obvious. But unless a curious but untrained reasoner somehow finds out that studying these fields will help them, we shouldn't expect them to study them. Why on earth would someone try to read The Logic of Science if they didn't already know that it would improve their reasoning skills?

There are a lot more genuinely curious people out there than there are rationalists. But unless those curious people happen to meet a LWer, or stumble across a link to this site, their chances of lear... (read more)

Also, they would seek to personally become an immortal super-intelligence, since many truths simply can't be learned by an unenhanced human, and certainly not within a human lifetime.

(Which is why the Yudkowsky-Armstrong Fun-Theoretic Utopia leaves me cold. Would any curious person not choose to become superintelligent and "have direct philosophical conversations with the Machines" if the only alternative is to essentially play the post-Singularity equivalent of the World of Warcraft?)

I'm having difficulty knowing what level of rationalist this is aimed at. Are the people you talk to every week students of rationality, or 'normal' people?

This post applies to both, I imagine. But because you talk about "people" instead of explicitly talking about people like me, it's easy to see this post as not being aimed at me. (Maybe it's not).

What I mean is: It's easy to praise oneself and one's peers by talking about people of a lower class. When I was young, it was 'dumb people', when I was a bit more sophisticated it was 'theists', when I was an Objectivist, it was 'non-Objectivists', and now that I'm a rationalist the temptation is to criticize those who "know almost nothing of logic, probability theory, argument, scientific method, epistemology, artificial intelligence, human cognitive science, or debiasing techniques." So this post, because it isn't clearly directed at people who have worked hard to do better in the ways prescribed by the Sequences, causes my semiconscious mind to ask: "is this a beginning level post, or something I should actually pay attention to?" Are you telling me to do better, or criticizing outsiders in order to pro... (read more)

You're doing that thing where you write like Yudkowsky again. It's kind of hot.

Dare I say it? Few people look like they really want true beliefs.

I think otherwise - most people want to have true beliefs. However, they have rather limited trust in the powers of their own logic, as the experience of school has taught them that they are often wrong. They don't have the numerical skills to embark on anything more numerically ambitious than what money requires. They expect to be wrong often, and rarely use formal reason as such. But they still want to have true beliefs, and rely mostly on intuition and experience to decide on that.

For most people, most beliefs are socially acquired - people acquire their beliefs from the people around them, and they tend to acquire large blocks of belief together. One shouldn't underestimate the sheer amount of work needed to do anything different.

Most people never create a new idea (in the sense you're talking about) in their entire lives - they have experiences, yes, and they change beliefs based on experience. But they do not regard themselves as having the basic equipment to generate ideas, or to be sophisticated in judging between them.

In the end I've come to the view that none of us can change this (well, not anytime soon... (read more)

FWIW I linked to this though my Twitter feed and got a very negative reaction from my friends, though the reasons they give for disliking it are pretty varied; they said things like

• it's so arrogant!
• It's absolutist - not everyone will have time to study these things
• but what is "truth" really?
• what about my-favourite-discipline? (Physics in one case)

One person has promised to write up what they felt in a blog post, which I look forward to reading.

They would study artificial intelligence to learn the algorithms, the math, the laws of how an ideal agent would acquire true beliefs.

Really? The others make sense, but it's not clear this will be useful to a human trying to learn things themselves. If I want to notice patterns, "plug all of your information into a matrix and perform eigenvector decompositions" is probably not going to get me very far.

So are those who claim to seek truth, but really don't, merely akratic or are they hypocritical?

I think you are confusing between wanting to know, and being good at it.

Imagine someone in the stone age, would you say none was genuinely curious because they didn't know about all those fields which weren't invented yet ?

Then, what about someone living in our world, but not knowing about Bayesian reasoning, AI, ... ? How can he know that those fields are fundamental to learn, to satisfy their curiosity on another field, before at least learning the basis of them ? When you don't know about Bayes' theorem, but you are curious (you really want to know the ... (read more)

I'm not sure there's an overarching "curiosity" that people have or don't have: I'm very curious about whether a specific kind of database will perform adequately in certain circumstances (long story) but I'm only mildly curious about how to identify which French painter during the 19th century painted which picture. Some art experts, I'm sure, have cultivated the skill to guess within seconds which painter it is for every picture. I wouldn't mind having that skill -- it sounds like a fun skill to have -- but it seems like it would be more resour... (read more)

Who can quarrel with this, except perhaps on emphasis? All that can really be asked is whether the list of subjects prime for pursuit by rationalists is complete. The one major omission: acquiring writing skill. This is vital not only for articulating your ideas, so you get worthwhile feedback. The quality of ideas themselves depends on how well they're expressed. That Darwin was a superb writer isn't an incidental fact. (See "Can bad writers be good thinkers?"; "Are good thinkers good writers?"; "Some writing skills undermine thou... (read more)

More or less accurate, though of course there's a ton of stuff that was left unsaid. "Study fields like these" is easy to say, "learn skills like these" is really difficult. There's no easy way to communicate skills, and sanity is a skill-set. You kinda just have to hope people have enough lucidity to make connections between fields and reliably see single step implications, and enough ambition to seek out and learn the skills from better thinkers than themselves. E.g. thanks to having brilliant friends I know a lot of cognitive tricks ... (read more)