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Question: How to be more rational without being more misanthropic? / Rationality in life and the workplace
This is actually a terrible title, but I couldn’t find a better one.
I’m currently in college, doing something I’m interested in, with good career prospects (basically, I’m in a very good business school, though my degree also has both a touch of polsci and of sustainability/energy and environment). However, even though I like what I’m studying, I’m a lot less comfortable with the vibes that go with it: neither most of management roles nor ‘warm fuzzies activism’ environmentalism (especially coupled with widespread political involvement) seem to be the most obvious place to find LW-style rationalists-in-training, and in fact it can sometimes (only rarely, I’ve got to admit) feel like I’m actually running against the tide by trying to be more rational, in a way that wouldn’t be true if I were in a STEM field.
However, I’d be really surprised if everyone here came strictly from programming, math, or physics backgrounds only, as rationalism certainly isn’t limited to any field, being mainly a sort of mental personal hygiene for the rationalist himself.
But I’m still getting concerned with how to do it in practice: the social pressures and work culture in management positions sound like they would probably make it harder to follow rationalism there. No, scratch that, of course it wouldn’t prevent me at all from keeping an eye on my own cognitive processes, at least once I’ve graduated and left the heavily politicized /huge social pressure college I’m currently in, but it would still mean some form of getting entangled into culture wars stuff, in ways that might mean it would be more difficult for me to use rationality to do a good job. And it might also make me mad at people. Yeah, I know, we (‘we-regular human beings who can’t stand the culture wars anymore’, not only ‘we-LW folks’) all feel like this, but I’m having trouble finding a rationalist answer to that.
Hence my two questions: rationality is mainly built for oneself, for some kind of self-improvement, and it couldn’t be otherwise, but how can it be used in context where there are other people around who don’t want too much of these weirdly rigorous and nerdy ways of dealing with things? And also, rationality is great to think about one’s worldview, as well as other people’s, and to have informed debates instead of bravery debates, etc. but it still is super hard to use all of that when a) the other person doesn’t want to depoliticize the issue, or think clearly about it, and b) they don‘t want you to say you’d rather not have this conversation, either: how do I deal with these situations without becoming mad at people?
N.B.: Until today, I had only ever commented on other people’s posts here, so tell me if I’ve made any kind of mistakes in writing this :)
I think that working effectively in high-people-skills potentially-politicized roles like management necessarily involve needing to be able to be internally frank & honest with oneself while presenting partial truths and selected subsets of your beliefs to the outside world. Not to deceive people, but to tell them what they need to hear rather than things that won't be helpful to them where they are currently at. Not an easy skill! Probably getting into the habit of privately writing down your 'full thoughts' whenever you feel a bit of friction around being fully open with people is a good way to maintain your internal honesty. Also, making private predictions about facts and future events, to keep yourself calibrated.
According to the few posts on the topic, not everyone here agree about the extent and implications of climate change, but, since LW is full of people more knowledgeable than me on most topics, including this one, I want to ask a question about climate change anyway:
Whatever are the implications of this change, we’re releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it can be expected to increase global temperatures. Now, what do we do? I mean, my question is, there are a lot of politicians and activists suggesting a lot of solutions, and I can’t make sense of which ones are are actually the most supported by the literature, or make more sense. And I have the same problem about the issues and drawbacks that are never mentioned but that would arise were we to implement those solutions.
So, my main contribution to LW seems to be asking other people to explain stuff to me (I hope you don’t mind :) ), but do you people have any ideas on the question?
Happily, the world's experts regularly compile consensus reports for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Sixth Assessment Report is currently being finalized. While the full report is many thousands of pages, the "summary for policymakers" is an easy - sometimes boring - read at tens of pages.
I think you're asking about wg2 and wg3, in which case reading the SPM might be useful - there's about 60 pages of them once you skip the frontmatter etc. Most shorter answers are going to be at best true but kinda useless "reduce emissions in the most cost-effective politically-feasible way, and take appropriate local action to adapt to changing conditions" would be my one-sentence attempt.
Thanks for your answer.
I actually recently had an opportunity to skim through the Working Group 2’s full report, so I know there is some stuff there. I hadn’t thought of looking at the WG3’s, for some reason, even though it’s probably more useful for my question, so thanks for suggesting it.
Rationality and social anxiety
The last few times I wrote stuff here, it was to ask questions that were basically about myself, and therefore entirely uninteresting to anyone else here. But I think it has finally evolved into an actually interesting question about rationality. That’s not really a complex question, or even one I have nice answers for, but it’s one that really seems to have been overlooked here, even though it also seems like it should be central to getting more people on board with rationality. Also, of course, that’s something I’m personally struggling a lot with, to the point where I would say it’s the main barrier preventing me from being as skilled at applying rationality the way I would like.
Bay Area Rationality is a subculture ; and it seems to include a rather large proportion of some types of people, like people on the autism spectrum, and generally all manner of contrarian folks, who may not care too much about fitting in society at large and espousing commonly-held views. Neither of these statements should be at all surprising, but the reason I’m highlighting them is that most people aren’t like that, which isn’t that surprising either, but has interesting implications. My point is that most people, including myself (*), aren’t that comfortable being a contrarian when others aren’t (as if being a contrarian when everyone else is too was at all fun ;) ), most people aren’t really able to tolerate being looked down upon by a dining roomful of people after trying to suggest that shouting at each other over politics might not be the ultimate goal of a Christmas dinner, most people aren’t really able to stand up to a college teacher and even think about what would be a polite and productive way of explaining him he’s talking nonsense, (**), etc, etc.
So, that’s my question for us: how can we help our brains go to all the trouble of being a rationalist while being as socially anxious as most people (if not cripplingly overanxious, like I am)?
Any ideas?
(*) Actually, I’d say for me particularly it’s been getting worse with time, as my mild-Asperger induced social awkwardness was partly rubbed off by the contact of other people.
(**) Obviously, this description of what "most people" do was based upon a mildly rigorous analysis conducted on a sample of one (1) individual. So feel free to discuss that point also, because it seems obviously true to me, so there must be something to be said against it ;)
The more I think of it, the more it sounds like I’ve been falling into the valley of bad rationality, which I knew about but never realised I was in. Still, that doesn’t change my question much: what’s the way out?, or rather, how do I make getting out of it easier? There aren’t many resource on that specific topic, although a lot of things go very near it indeed.
Hi!
This is the second shortform I’ve ever written, both in the space of a few days, and it’s also the second one to be me asking for advice about an issue I have. I guess I should start making more useful contributions next time ;)
Anyway, at least it won’t be a long post: I’ve reasons to believe that my neuroticism — as in, the Big Five personality trait of that name — is really super high. I also have reasons to believe that’s because I’m ‘on the spectrum’ or something, but that specific point is less relevant. What I’m interested in is, I could be happier with my life if I weren’t constantly angered by small things, and not being mad at everyone and everything would let me make better choices, avoiding opportunities for being depressed and brooding over stuff, thereby becoming even more depressed (etc., etc.) later on. However, it seems like everything I’ve seen on the topic was either not easily actionable advice, or, more often, wasn’t actually so much about neuroticism as about the mental illnesses that may go with it. Rationality has been, and still is, a huge help in dealing with that, as well as in understanding my own thought process more generally. In fact, that’s what I’ve found the most helpful to date. But, same thing, I’ve never seen anything here that was specifically about neuroticism, even though it seems like it could be useful to people in general — and to me as well :) Hence the question: what do other very neurotic folks here do to be happy in spite of it?
When in high school, I used to spend all day on LW, or reading SSC, or mostly watching stuff on Youtube. Then, I went to uni, and I got really dissatisfied with my degree, at about the same time Covid hit. I was bored to death by what I was learning. But now, looking back at it, I think my brain got used to it? That’s the problem I’m trying to think about here: it seems like I’m not as curious as I used to be? And I’m curious why that would be so? Is there some kind of rat race of curiosity where one has to keep up with others? I don’t know how to phrase it, but it seems like some kind of feedback loop, where boredom creates less curiosity? But why would it be so? Isn’t that supposed to be the other way round? Or is there something wrong with me here ;-) ?