The primary impacts of reading rationalist blogs are that 1) I have been frequently distracted at work, and 2) my conversations have gotten much worse. Talking to non-rationalists, I am perpetually holding myself back from saying "oh yes, that’s just the thing where no one has coherentmeta-principles" or "that’s the thing where facts are purpose-dependent". Talking to rationalists is not much better, since it feels less like a free exchange of ideas, and more like an exchange of "have you read post?"
There are some specific areas where rationality might help, like using Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria to know when it’s plausible to think I have an original insight that is not already "priced into the market", but even here, I’m not convinced these beat out specific knowledge. If you want to start a defensible monopoly, reading about business strategy or startup-specific strategy will probably be more useful than trying to reason about "efficiency" in a totally abstract sense.
And yet, I will continue reading these blogs, and if Slate Star Codex ever releases a new post, I will likely drop whatever I am doing to read it. This has nothing to do with self-improvement or "systematized winning.
It’s solely because weird blogs on the internet make me feel less alone.
Is there any data on how people feel like rationality has changed their lives? Somewhat separate to what we're doing as a community / what some of the most successful rationalists are up to, it seems worth trying to work out how engaging more with rationality changes things for people. I'm pretty sure my engagement with rationality has helped me become stronger; if it turned out not to help most people that would definitely change how I presented things.
I'm planning to write a sequence on all positive and negative effects the practice of rationality has had on my life, and I already have one post on pitfalls. Future posts will probably be about things like
forming realistic expectations
reading LW in a way that's less reality-masking
a list of all the low-hanging fruit I've found
a list of interventions I've tried
weird effects from learning some rationality techniques but not others
the benefits of diversifying one's sources of knowledge
re-learning how to interact with non-rationalist society
I kind of view this as a process of sequential self-sorting.
Some people go on and become obviously successful and develop a culture with norms, I think almost fully described by the early-to-middle LW proclaimed ideals. I am not among them and can't say for certain; I am only certain they keep diversifying.
Other people trickle off into the other branch which keeps branching. I am among them. I keep running into a need to express thoughts according to virtuous rules which overshadows other needs most starkly, but I don't feel inclined to make more things (including immaterial). Some thoughts have been nesting in me for years and I don't expect them to leave soon.
https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning
From near the end: