Are you sure you want to refer to RationalWiki? Even leaving aside their hostility to LessWrong, the typical article there does not exhibit any especial rationality, merely the typical standard of blog rants to be found anywhere on the web. As I observed once before, rationality is their flag, not their method.
This is why I phrased it as "sections of RationalWiki." I do find some stuff there helpful, but mostly not. I will think some more about this point - ironic that the comment below makes exactly the opposite point. I'm open to persuasion, what do you and others think?
RationalWiki serves as a bridge for the inferential distance problem so often discussed here. Topics such as fallacies and biases are discussed at RationalWiki in a language that the general public can understand. As a gateway drug toward more advanced rationality, it has an educational value that we shouldn't dismiss.
Ok, I'm convinced. I'm editing the article to take out RationalWiki. Thanks for helping me update!
To add a few arguments:
RationalWiki follows the standard New Atheist pattern of being too certain in their conclusions. Beliefs that aren't orthodox get rejected because they violate the orthodox New Atheist wordview. Cromwell's rule doesn't permeate the website.
RationalWiki is not about valuing empiricism and holding views backed up by empiric evidence. Wiki-entries get accepted when they speak for the orthodox side and not because they cite scientific studies to back up their claims.
Culturally people exposed to RationalWiki might come off with considering rationality as being about straw vulcan rationality.
Thanks for helping fill me in more about RationalWiki. I will keep this in mind and avoid directing people to it in the future. Much appreciated!
That is like recommending a bad textbook as a gateway to learning from a good one. RationalWiki says the wrong things with the wrong attitude. I believe that introducing people to it is counterproductive. Some of it reads as if it was written by a 14-year-old with a naive overestimation of his smartness.
As a gateway drug toward more advanced rationality, it has an educational value that we shouldn't dismiss.
This effect seems overshadowed by worries that knowing about biases can hurt people to me.
Ok, I'm convinced. I'm editing the article to take out RationalWiki. Thanks for helping me update!
An article with the title of "Fix Your Thinking Using Science" immediately goes into the same bin as "Lose 50 pounds using this weird trick".
The target audience is readers who would be interested in science-based self-improvement if it was presented to them - people who have a college education, and who like to read broad venues such as Slate, Salon, Huffington Post, etc. The aim of the article is to convey that our thinking is inherently flawed, but can be improved to be less wrong by using rationality-informed strategies, and to encourage people to use these strategies.
College education ain't what it used to be :-D but reasonably smart people should be suspicious of your article because you're triggering a LOT of bullshit detectors.
The most blatant is your use of the word "science" as the functional equivalent of "revealed Truth". Believe this because science. Um...
Also, passages like "It felt wonderful and liberating to be deeply certain that we could not have done better than we did through applying the principles of probabilistic thinking and other rationality-informed strategies" are pretty cringeworthy.
FYI, I edited the article based on your comments with adding qualifiers and added the title suggested by NancyLebovitz
Thanks for the specific feedback about the sentence, I'll work on revising it.
Regarding science, I'll put in some qualifiers on that, good point!
Ideas on improving the title?
Upvoted for improving in response to feedback. I know it can be daunting to receive negative or even neutral feedback over something that you put time and effort into. It still feels like an underdeveloped thesis though. The main message seems to be applying behavioral science to all kinds of decision making, but that is very ambitious, and the content doesn't quite get there.
Thanks for upvoting, and for your own feedback. Thoughts about how to help the content get there?
I'm not sure. Tentatively, if it is for a popular audience, then you need to do two things: -Convince them that biases or errors in thinking are a problem, possibly by providing some examples. -Convince them that trainings can result in better decision making, not just because they are backed up by experts, but because they work. Describe or give examples of how these trainings improve people's decision making.
Are house-buyers, scholars, academics and bloggers the sanity waterline you hope to reach and raise? That is who you speak of and to. I suggest these are closer to the high water marks. With exactly zero inference on the truth value of any religion, I suggest people who are religious by their own account are closer to a waterline of sanity. Who is in the middle of the sanity curve? You seem to be talking to one end of it.
And do you have anything for people whose brains are physically incapable of sanity? Traumatic brain injury, chemical imbalances, people who are high or children, for instance.
Children are capable of sanity. They simply know little and don't have long-term goals. But they are good at tracking what they do understand; this might be used for training.
Objects continue to exist when we don't see them. Other people have thoughts that are different from our thoughts. Water does not change its amount when poured from one container to another. Language. Children, at different ages, do not have the physical capability of understanding these facts. It isn't that they are miniature adults who have yet to learn things. They cannot learn these things, cannot act on them, cannot perceive them in others. Later, they can. Infants and children are cognitively distinct from adults. There is a change from infant to child to adult (for the lucky), but they are not all the same. Something I keep in my mind when I read people write what is best for all people regarding rational thought. The cloud of ideas that is rational thought is not evenly distributed.
You are right, this article talks to one end of the sanity curve. The goal of Intentional Insights is to have content aimed at different parts of the sanity curve as well, for example here in the form of a popular listicle and here in the form of a video for religious people.
Nope, nothing for people whose brains are physically incapable of sanity.
I think "How I Became Less Wrong" is too vague to be interesting, but I admit that's just my reaction. I think "How I Became Less Wrong about Choosing a House" works better.
Also, didn't you mean that the math helped to clarify your emotional thinking, even when it clashed with aesthetic preferences? The way you put it, it sounds Rather Grim:) ETA: 'my students' - you have some? It would be interesting to read about, provide more examples.
Also, didn't you mean that the math helped to clarify your emotional thinking, even when it clashed with aesthetic preferences? The way you put it, it sounds Rather Grim:) ETA: 'my students' - you have some? It would be interesting to read about, provide more examples.
Would appreciate feedback on this article I plan to submit to a broad media publication as part of my broader project of promoting rationality and raising the sanity waterline. Can't make it much longer as I'm at word limit, so if you suggest adding something, also suggest taking something away. The article is below the black line and thanks for any feedback!
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Article - How I Became Less Wrong
On a sunny day in early August, my wife Agnes Vishnevkin and I came to a Rationality Dojo in Columbus, OH. Run by Max Harms, this group is devoted to growing mentally stronger through mental fitness practices. That day, the dojo’s activities focused on probabilistic thinking, a practice of assigning probabilities to our intuitive predictions about the world to improve our ability to evaluate reality accurately and make wise decisions to reach our goals. After learning the principles of probabilistic thinking, we discussed how to apply this strategy to everyday life.
We were so grateful for this practice in early September, when my wife and I started shopping for our new house. We discussed in advance the specific goals we had for the house, enabling us to save a lot of time by narrowing our options. We then spent one day visiting a number of places we liked, rating each aspect of the house important to us on a numerical scale. After visiting all these places, we sat down and discussed the probabilities on what house would best meet our goals. The math made it much easier to overcome our individual aesthetic preferences, and focus on what would make us happiest in the long run. We settled on our top choice, made a bid, and signed our contract.
This sounds like a dry and not very exciting process. Well, we were very excited!
Why? Because we were confident that we made the best decision with the information available to us. The decision to get a new house is one of the biggest financial decisions we will make in our lifetime. It felt great to know that we could not have done any better than we did through applying the principles of probabilistic thinking and other rationality-informed strategies. Of course, we could still be wrong, there are no guarantees in life. Yet we know we did the best we could - we grew less wrong.
These strategies are vital for improving our thinking because our brains are inherently irrational. Research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields from the middle of the twentieth century has discovered hundreds of thinking errors, called cognitive biases. These thinking errors cause us to make flawed decisions – in finances, relationships, health and well-being, politics, etc.
Recently, popular books by scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Chip and Dan Heath, and other scholars have brought these problems from the halls of academia to the attention of the broad public. However, these books have not focused on how we can address these problems in everyday life.
So far, the main genre dedicated to popularizing strategies to improve our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns has been in the field of self-improvement. Unfortunately, self-improvement is rarely informed by science, and instead relies on personal experience and inspiring stories. While such self-improvement activities certainly help many, it is hard to tell whether the impact comes from the actual effectiveness of the specific activities or a placebo effect due to people being inspired to work on improving themselves.
The lack of scientific popularization of strategies dealing with thinking errors in large part resulted from the fact that early scholarly efforts to address thinking errors on an individual level did not lead to lasting improvement. Consequently, the brunt of the scholarship and consequent efforts to address these problems focused on organizations and government policy creating nudges and incentives to get people to “do the right thing.” A recent example is Barack Obama issuing an Executive Order for the federal government to use behavioral science insights in all aspects of its work.
However, research in the last decade, from Keith Stanovich, Hal Arkes, and others revealed that we can fix our thinking, sometimes with a single training. For example, my own research and writing shows how people can learn to reach their long-term goals and find their life meaning and purpose using science-based strategies. This scientific approach does not guarantee the right decision, but it is the best method we currently have, and will improve in the future with more research.
This science is mostly trapped in academic books and articles. I teach on this topic to my college students, and they find it enriching: as one student stated, the class "helped me to see some of the problems I may be employing in my thinking about life and other people." Yet most people do not have university library access, and even if they did, would not be interested in making their way through dense academic writing.
Yet a budding movement called Rationality has been going through the complex academic materials and adapting them to everyday life, as exemplified by Rationality Dojo. This small movement has relatively few public outlets. The website LessWrong is dedicated to high-level discussions of strategies to improve thinking patterns and ClearerThinking offers some online courses on improving decision making. The Center for Applied Rationality offers intense in-person workshops for entrepreneurs and founders. Effective Altruism brings insights from rationality to philanthropy. Intentional Insights is a new nonprofit devoted to popularizing rationality-informed strategies to a broad public through blogs, videos, books, apps, and in-person workshops.
Right now, scholars such as myself are testing the strategies developed by Rationality. My probabilistic estimate is that these studies will show that this science-based form of self-improvement is more effective than self-improvement based on personal experience.
In the meantime, I encourage you to consider science-based strategies adapted to everyday life such as probabilistic thinking. You do not have to be nudged by policy makers and CEOs. Instead, you can be intentional and use rationality to make the best decisions for your own goals!
EDIT: Edited based on comments by Lumifer, NancyLebovitz, Romashka, ChristianKi, Vaniver, RichardKennway