I've read about a quarter of the sequences, but I'm not sure if this topic has been addressed on LessWrong before. If it has, let me know. The Upward Scaling Importance of Rationality goes like this: The more influence your thought process and decisions have, the more important it is...
As soon as I got out of college I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I had never had a job at a restaurant, but my mom had known the owners and I felt obligated to avoid performing badly. Yet inevitably I did perform badly, and how...
There is a lot to say about IQ. I plan to make a video about it. It's not my field, but I've been reading the literature on and off for 17 years. Recently, I have noticed an explosion in what we can (for the purpose of this post) call SecretSauce-ism which is adjacent to a "cult of genius" mindset, i.e. the idea that there is some secret genius juice that lends godlike credibility to a person. This is harmful, so I've been rereading the literature, and have over the past week spent about 50-100 hours refamiliarizing myself with the current literature.
It's essential to know that IQ is primarily used to measure g... (read 632 more words →)
When I used the website, contributors like lukeprog fostered the self-study of rationality through rigorous source materials like textbooks.
This is no longer remotely close to the case, and the community has become farcical hangout club with redundant jargon/nerd-slang and intolerable idiosyncrasies. Example below:
If the answer is in the video, I won't see it.
Hopeful to disappoint you, but the answer is in the video.
I am way more likely to make fun of you for posting stuff like this than any AI ever will.
epistemic status: lmao
Kindness will only affect decisions where altruistic behavior wouldn't occur if lacking kindness. Integrity I'm even less sure about. Rationality could affect any decision where bias or fuzzy reasoning is involved, which is almost every decision.
I've read about a quarter of the sequences, but I'm not sure if this topic has been addressed on LessWrong before. If it has, let me know.
The Upward Scaling Importance of Rationality goes like this:
The more influence your thought process and decisions have, the more important it is that you're rationalist. In the grand scheme of things, it is relatively unimportant that a barback at a restaurant is a rationalist, and I say this having done that. It is extremely important that a leader of a highly influential company, or a president of a university or country is a rationalist. Their decisions affect thousands if not millions of people.
The more influential you are,... (read more)
You should get a Ph.D. in Philosophy if you consider the material studied in philosophy to be an end in itself. Philosophy is a truthseeking discipline, so if you find that inherently rewarding and could imagine doing that for a large part of your life it's a good decision. Don't worry about the wariness of philosophy: I can guarantee you that the criticisms levied here against philosophy have been addressed tenfold in actual philosophy departments, by people with sympathies closer to Luke's than you'd think.
That said, a lot of people go into graduate programs for bad reasons. Here are two I've been tempted by:
#1.
Minimizing Status Risk. A lot of people think about... (read 371 more words →)
Sure, in the very short run (starting from absolutely no knowledge of the game) you'd have to make mistakes to learn anything at all. But the process of getting better is a gradual decrease of the frequency of those mistakes. You'd want to minimize your mistakes as much as possible as you got better, because the frequency of mistakes will be strongly correlated with how much you lose.
I think you're seeing "try to minimize how many mistakes you make" and reading that as "trying to make no mistakes." There are certainly mistakes you'll have to make to get better, but then there are superfluous mistakes that some people may make while others won't, or catastrophic mistakes that would make you look really bad which you'd definitely want to avoid. The depth of mistakes can go much deeper than the necessary mistakes you'd have to make to get better, in other words.
I really liked this post, and I think a lot of people aren't giving you enough credit. I've felt similarly before -- not to the point of suicide, and I think you might want to find someone who you can confide those anxieties with -- but about being angered at someone's dismissal of rationalist methodology. Because ultimately, it's the methodology which makes someone a rationalist, not necessarily a set of beliefs. The categorizing of emotions as in opposition to logic for example is a feature I've been frustrated with for quite some time, because emotions aren't anti-logical so much as they are alogical. (In my personal life, I'm an archetype of someone... (read more)
I don't currently work at a restaurant, so at the moment I'm afraid of nothing.
But for the purposes of the example, it's not about discovering mistakes or incompetence -- it's about your level of incompetence being much greater than you previously estimated, for reasons you were unaware of prior to being exposed to those reasons.
I find that similar to the concept of fractal wrongness. What distinguishes an iceberg from a fractal is that you're in situations where someone is resisting exposing the whole iceberg for one reason or another. In the dishonesty scenario, you realize one lie reveals many others but only because that person has left you a tidbit of information that cracks their facade and allows you to infer just how deeply they've lied to you -- or in the case of attraction, an event or action that only would occur if they had a much greater level of attraction existing below the surface.
As soon as I got out of college I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I had never had a job at a restaurant, but my mom had known the owners and I felt obligated to avoid performing badly. Yet inevitably I did perform badly, and how this performance was evaluated would greatly affect my way of perceiving my mistakes.
If you're entrenched in an organization, there's a good chance you have an idea of what it is you're supposed to do and what mistakes you will or will not be making. But suppose you're in a position like this one: by way of your ignorance you know you're going to make a... (read 510 more words →)
There is a lot going on with Nobel prize winners. The most common trait is that they work extremely hard. There have been 40-something g-loaded subtasks that I know of. It's quite possible that they have an exceptional "recipe" of sub-abilities from these elemental cognitive abilities that won't show up on a traditional WAIS IV.
But this is to be expected; the primary purpose of IQ testing is (1) to measure cognitive decline or some other kind of medical concern and/or (2) to determine which children go into gifted programs. Adult IQ is rarely tested outside of these settings, yet it is also where people try to draw the most generalizations.
(The reason you... (read more)