Gleb_Tsipursky

At the Less Wrong Meetup in Columbus, OH over the last couple of months, we discussed optimizing the Twelve Virtues of Rationality. In doing so, we were inspired by what Eliezer himself said in the essay: * Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake. So we first decided on the purpose of optimizing, and settled on yielding virtues that would be most impactful and effective for motivating people to become more rational, in other words optimizations that would produce the most utilons and hedons for the purpose of winning. There were a bunch of different suggestions. I tried to apply them to myself over the last few weeks and want to share my findings. First Suggestion Replace Perfectionism with Improvement Motivation for Replacement Perfectionism, both in how it pattern matches and in its actual description in the essay, orients toward focusing on defects and errors in oneself. By depicting the self as always flawed, and portraying the aspiring rationalist's job as seeking to find the flaws, the virtue of perfectionism is framed negatively, and is bound to result in negative reinforcement. Finding a flaw feels bad, and in many people that creates ugh fields around actually doing that search, as reported by participants at the Meetup. Instead, a positive framing of this virtue would be Improvement. Then, the aspiring rationalist can feel ok about where s/he is right now, but orient toward improving and growing mentally stronger - Tsuyoku Naritai! All improvement would be about gaining more hedons, and thus use the power of positive reinforcement. Generally, research suggests that positive reinforcement is effective in motivating the repetition of behavior