Rationality should not be painful.

Putting the lessons of the Sequences into practice, reflecting on and mentally rehearsing the core ideas, making them your own and weaving them into your everyday habits of thought and action until they become a part of you - at no point should any of this cause an increase in mental anguish, emotional vulnerability, depression, psychosis, mania etc., even temporarily. The worst-case consequences of absorbing these lessons should be that you regret some of your past life choices or perhaps come to realize that you're stuck in a bad situation that you can't easily change. But rationality should also leave you strictly better-equipped to deal with that situation, if you find yourself in it.

Also, the feeling of successfully becoming more rational should not feel like a sudden, tectonic shift in your mental processes or beliefs (in contrast to actually changing your mind about something concrete, which can sometimes feel like that). Rationality should feel natural and gradual and obvious in retrospect, like it was always a part of you, waiting to be discovered and adopted.

I am using "should" in the paragraphs above both descriptively and normatively. It is partly a factual claim: if you're not better off, you're probably missing something or "doing it wrong", in some concrete, identifiable way. But I am also making a normative / imperative statement that can serve as advice or a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts - if your experience is different or you disagree, consider whether there's a mental motion you can take to make it true. 

I am also not claiming that the Valley of Bad Rationality is entirely fake. But I am saying it's not that big of a deal, and in any case the best way out is through. And also that "through" should feel natural / good / easy.

I am not very interested in meditation or jhanas or taking psychoactive drugs or various other forms of "woo". I believe that the beneficial effects that many people derive from these things are real and good, but I suspect they wouldn't work on me. Not because I don't believe in them, but because I already get basically all the plausible benefits from such things by virtue of being a relatively happy, high-energy, mentally stable person with a healthy, well-organized mind.

Some of these qualities are a lucky consequence of genetics, having a nice childhood, a nice life, being generally smart, etc. But there's definitely a chunk of it that I attribute directly to having read and internalized the Sequences in my early teens, and then applied them to thousands of tiny and sometimes not-so-tiny tribulations of everyday life over the years.

The thoughts above are partially / vaguely in response to this post and its comment section about CFAR workshops, but also to some other hazy ideas that I've seen floating around lately.

I have never been to a CFAR workshop and don't actually have a strong opinion on whether attending one is a good idea or not - if you're considering going, I'd advise you to read the warnings / caveats in the post and comments, and if you feel like (a) they don't apply to you and (b) a CFAR workshop sounds like your thing, it's worth going? You'll probably meet some interesting people, have fun, and learn some useful skills. But I suspect that attending such a workshop is not a necessary or even all that helpful ingredient for actually becoming more rational.

A while ago, Eliezer wrote in the preface for the published version of the Sequences:

It ties in to the first-largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn’t realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn’t realize that part was the priority; and regarding this I can only say “Oops” and “Duh.”

Yes, sometimes those big issues really are big and really are important; but that doesn’t change the basic truth that to master skills you need to practice them and it’s harder to practice on things that are further away. (Today the Center for Applied Rationality is working on repairing this huge mistake of mine in a more systematic fashion.)

And has also written:

Jeffreyssai inwardly winced at the thought of trying to pick up rationality by watching other people talk about it—

Maybe I just am typical-minding / generalizing from one example here, but in my case, simply reading a bunch of blog posts and quietly reflecting on them on my own did work, and in retrospect it feels like the only thing that could have worked, or at least that attending a workshop, practicing a bunch of rationality exercises from a handbook, discussing in a group setting, etc. would not have been particularly effective on its own, and potentially even detracting or at least distracting.

And, regardless of whether the caveats / warnings / dis-recommendations in the CFAR post and comments are worth heeding, I suspect they're pointing at issues that are just not that closely related to (what I think of as) the actual core of learning rationality.

Maybe the recent tariff blowup is actually just a misunderstanding due to bad terminology, and all we need to do is popularize some better terms or definitions. We're pretty good at that around here, right?

Here's my proposal: flip the definitions of "trade surplus" and "trade deficit." This might cause a bit of confusion at first, and a lot of existing textbooks will need updating, but I believe these new definitions capture economic reality more accurately, and will promote clearer thinking and maybe even better policy from certain influential decision-makers, once widely adopted.

New definitions:

• Trade surplus: Country A has a bilateral "trade surplus" with Country B if Country A imports more tangible goods (cars, steel, electronics, etc.) from Country B than it exports back. In other words, Country A ends up with more real, physical items. Country B, meanwhile, ends up with more than it started with of something much less important: fiat currency (flimsy paper money) or 1s and 0s in a digital ledger (probably not even on a blockchain!).

  If you extrapolate this indefinitely in a vacuum, Country A eventually accumulates all of Country B's tangible goods, while Country B is left with a big pile of paper. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal for Country A if you ask me.

  It's OK if not everyone follows this explanation or believes it - they can tell it's the good one because it has "surplus" in the name. Surely everyone wants a surplus.

• Trade deficit: Conversely, Country A has a "trade deficit" if it exports more tangible resources than it imports, and thus ends up with less goods on net. In return, it only receives worthless fiat currency from some country trying to hoard actual stuff for their own people. Terrible deal!

  Again, if you don't totally follow, that's OK, just pay attention to the word "deficit". Everyone knows that deficits are bad and should be avoided.

Under the new definitions, it becomes clear that merely returning to the previous status quo of a few days ago, where the US only "wins" the trade war by several hundred billion dollars, is insufficient for the truly ambitious statesman. Instead, the US government should aggressively mint more fiat currency in order to purchase foreign goods, magnifying our trade surplus and ensuring that in the long run the United States becomes the owner of all tangible global wealth.

Addressing second order concerns: if we're worried about a collapse in our ability to manufacture key strategic goods at home during a crisis, we can set aside part of the resulting increased surplus to subsidize domestic production in those areas. Some of the extra goods we're suddenly importing will probably be pretty useful in getting some new factories of our own off the ground. (But of course we shouldn't turn around and export any of that domestic production to other countries! That would only deplete our trade surplus.)