I have a fairly wide variety of friends. Here's some advice I find myself giving often, because it seems to cover a lot of what I think are the most common problems. The wording here isn't how I'd say it to them.
Health and lifestyle
More actionable rules might be better such as:
Wear a seat belt when driving. Save 10% of your income through your pension plan's index fund option. Don't smoke. Practice safe sex. Sign up for cryonics.
Wear a seat belt when driving.
Don't smoke.
Practice safe sex.
Safe bet. These significantly increase your life and health expectations at almost no cost.
Save 10% of your income through your pension plan's index fund option.
This heavily depends on your age, country, social level (which affects future discounting) and what not and is thus in its generality questionable.
Sign up for cryonics.
I don't know what kind of advice this is. Sure you are convinced that it may be right for you, but it is as far away from item 2) above as it can be.
From the standpoint of normal people cryonics is not very different from other afterlife memes and thus adding it to the list has the risk of descrediting (to normal people) the whole list.
It seems to me that the advice about Givewell has a lot of evidence behind it, but the rest of the advice doesn't have much evidence that it gives any benefit at all, for people of average intelligence or otherwise. It would be good to have a Givewell-like project that evaluated the costs and benefits of following various rationality advice.
Just wanted to point out an implicit and not necessarily correct assumption, leading to poor-quality advice:
Suppose you know a not-very-smart person (around or below average intelligence)
It seems that you assume that intelligence is one-dimensional. In my experience, while there is a correlation, most people are smarter in some areas than in others. For example, a mathematical genius may be incapable of introspection and have to interest in rational thinking outside math. Let's take your example:
S/he read about rationality, has utilitarian inclinations, and wants to make the world better. However, s/he isn't smart enough to discover new knowledge in most fields, or contribute very much to a conversation of more knowledgeable experts on a given topic. Let's assume s/he has no exceptional talents in any area.
First, an "average person" does not read about rationality and has no "utilitarian inclinations". They often do want to make the world better if socially conditioned to do so by their church or by the TV commercials showing a sick child in the 3rd world whom you can save for a dollar a day or something. So, the person you describe is not "averag...
Read Yvain's Epistemic Learned Helplessness. You can be convinced of anything by good arguing, but forewarned is forearmed.
"Study rationality anyway. Work harder to make up for your lack of intelligence." I don't think most of LessWrong's material is out of reach of an average-intelligence person.
"Think about exactly what people mean by words when they use them; there are all kinds of tricks to watch out for involving subtle variations of a word's meaning." Read Yvain's "The Worst Argument in the World"..
"Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy, which is what you're doing when you say 'This movie I'm watching sucks [absolutely, not just relativ...
These statements don't necessarily contradict each other. Even if average-intelligence people don't read Less Wrong, perhaps they could. Personally, I suspect it's more because of a lack of interest (and perhaps a constellation of social factors).
I bet the average LessWrong person has a great sense of humour and feels things more than other people, too.
Seriously, every informal IQ survey amongst a group/forum I have seen reports very high IQ. My (vague) memories of the LessWrong one included people who seemed to be off the scale (I don't mean very bright. I mean that such IQs either have never been given out in official testing rather than online tests, or possibly that they just can't be got on those tests and people were lying).
There's always a massive bias in self-reporting: those will only be emphasised on an intellectual website that starts the survey post by saying that LessWrongers are, on average, in the top 0.11% for SATs, and gives pre-packaged excuses for not reporting inconvenient results - "Many people would prefer not to have people knowing their scores. That's great, but please please please do post it anonymously. Especially if it's a low one, but not if it's low because you rushed the test", (my emphasis).
If there's a reason to be interested in average IQ beyond mutual ego-massage, I guess the best way would be to have an IQ test where you logged on as 'Less Wrong member X' and then it reported all the results, not just the ones that people chose to share. And where it revealed how many people pulled out halfway through (to avoid people bailing if they weren't doing well).
Selection bias - which groups and forums actually asked about IQ?
Your average knitting/auto maintenance/comic book forum probably has a lower average IQ but doesn't think to ask. And of course we're already selecting a little just by taking the figures off of web forums, which are a little on the cerebral side.
I think this underestimates the difficulty average humans have with just reading upwards of 2500 words about abstract ideas. It's not a question even of getting the explanation, it's a question of simply being able to pay attention to it.
I keep repeating this: The average human is extremely average. Check your privilege, as the social-justice types might say. You're assuming a level of comfort with, and interest in, abstraction that just is not the case for most of our species.
Play to your strengths; do what you're best at. You don't have to be best in the world at it for it to be valuable.
Good things about this advice are (a) it has a fairly-sound theory behind it (Comparative advantage), and (b) it applies whether or not you're smart, normal or dumb, so you don't get in to socially-destructive comparisons of intelligence.
When in doubt, ask. The stackexchange network is great to get answers to questions.
skeptics stackexchange is for example great to get answers to general questions.
If you encouter a significant claim on the internet it's often a useful website to check.
Recently I came about the claim that batteries follow something like Moore's law. I headed over to skeptics stackexchange and post a question.
Another useful habit is Anki. Especially if you don't trust your brain to remember information on it's own, let Anki help you.
look for tested methods that have significant positive results relevant to the area of interest
This part of advice needs to be more specific. For example which "positive results" should be trusted and which not. Because everyone who wants to sell you something will tell you about "positive results".
My 3 pieces of advice, for someone already convinced that something fairly accurate is going on, would be:
1) Try to sign up for cryonics before dying.
2) When donating to charity, use the recommendations of an organization like GiveWell ("the practical approach"), or donate to a charity working on existential risk ("the 'taking ideas seriously' approach).
3) (My one best piece of rationality advice) Other people have good reasons for their actions, according to themselves. That doesn't mean you'll think they're good once you find them out - but it does mean you should try to find them out.
I'm not sure how much raw intelligence matters. If a person who's average intelligence stays with a problem which doesn't get much attention for 10 years I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to contribute something to it.
Being intellectual means staying with intellectual problems over years instead of letting them drop because a new television series is more important.
Since IQ correlates with practically everything, including conscientousness and the ability to concentrate, I'm not convinced this advice is helpful. The average human may be plain unable to meaningfully stick with a problem for ten years. (That is, to actually productively work on the problem daily, not just have it on the to-do list and load up the data or whatever every so often.) I fear the LW bubble gives most people here a rather exaggerated estimate of the "average"; your median acquaintance is likely one or two standard deviations above the real population average, and that already makes a big difference.
I find your third point for practical advice to be significantly dis-charitable to someone of average intelligence. There are people that miss obvious patterns like, "This person gives bad advice," but I think people of average intellect are already well equipped to notice simple patterns like that.
I don't believe this is a coherent set of general advice that can be given here. What specific details and methods of rationality any given "average" person is missing, and what specific cognitive biases they suffer from most severely will va...
One of the most important steps to becoming more rational for an average person would be to disentangle themselves from the default goals / values imposed by society or their peers. This would free up a lot of time for figuring out their own goals and developing relevant skills.
An average person could go far with instrumental rationality techniques like those taught at CFAR. Exercises like goal factoring and habit training don't require a high capacity for abstraction, only willingness to be explicit about one's motivations. For accumulating factual knowledge, spaced repetition software could be very useful.
Right now I'm reading this book : " The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decision" , so that I can get myself familiar with the biases that I unconsciously do.
I would say asking for advice seems like a pretty useful heuristic then. Approach people with the same goals that are smart and ask them where to donate, or even what to believe. The fact that a smart person (who has given a lot of thought to something) believes something is good evidence that it is true. So basically: find a mentor.
However, s/he isn't smart enough to discover new knowledge in most fields, or contribute very much to a conversation of more knowledgeable experts on a given topic. Let's assume s/he has no exceptional talents in any area.
Most people are intellectually near-average or below-average, and I have not seen extensive discussion on how to help them lead happier lives that make the world a better place.
Upvoted for caring about other people. Most of your suggestions I agree with and there are some other good ones in the comments. I want to point out that th...
Specific advice: [ETA: If you decide that it is worth your time and effort to work directly on improving your general thinking skills, then one difficult but effective way to do that is to] learn to program and/or to learn math. Use google to find resources. Don't be embarrassed by books/articles with "for beginners" or "introductory" or "elementary" in their titles, and especially don't be embarrassed if even those are too hard (in fact, beware of the good old "elementary" math text, meaning "elementary... for ...
What should a not-very-smart person do? Suppose you know a not-very-smart person (around or below average intelligence). S/he read about rationality, has utilitarian inclinations, and wants to make the world better. However, s/he isn't smart enough to discover new knowledge in most fields, or contribute very much to a conversation of more knowledgeable experts on a given topic. Let's assume s/he has no exceptional talents in any area.
How do you think a person like that could best use his/her time and energy? What would you tell the person to do? This person may be, compared to average LW readership, less capable of noticing the irrationality in his/her actions even if s/he wants to be rid of it, and less easily able to notice the flaws in a bad argument. S/he may never be able to deeply understand why certain arguments are correct, certain scientific facts have to be the way they are, and telling him/her to be unsure or sure about anything seems dangerous if s/he doesn't really understand why.
My practical advice might be:
1) If you want to give to charity, follow GiveWell recommendations.
2) Learn about the basic biases, and commit to resisting them in your own life.
3) Follow advice that has been tested, that correctly predicts a positive outcome. If a hypothesis is untestable (there's an unsensible dragon in your garage) or doesn't predict anything (fire comes from phlogiston in combustable substances), or is tested and demonstrably false (god will smite you if you say it doesn't exist), don't waste time and energy on it. If you want to improve, look for tested methods that have significant positive results relevant to the area of interest. Similarly, if a person regularly gives you advice that does not lead to good outcomes, stop following it, and if someone gives advice that leads to good outcomes, start paying attention even if you like that person less.
At a more general level, my thoughts are tentative, but might include basic LW tenets such as:
1) Don't be afraid of the truth, because you're already enduring it.
2) If all the experts in a field agree on something, they might be wrong, but you are extremely unlikely to be better at uncovering the truth, so follow their advice, which might appear to conflict with...
3) Don't trust deep wisdom. Use Occam's razor, think about simple, basic reasons something might be true (this seems good for religion and moral issues, bad for scientific ideas and understanding)
4) If you find yourself flinching away from an idea, notice that, and give it extra attention.
Note: I mean this as a serious, and hopefully non-insulting question. Most people are intellectually near-average or below-average, and I have not seen extensive discussion on how to help them lead happier lives that make the world a better place.