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One should also know everything, but clearly that's impossible.

There are some areas of knowledge that are so unlikely to yield anything useful that it's not worth spending any time being curious about them. For humanity in general, psi phenomena now fall into this category. There was a time when they didn't, but it's safe to say that time is over. For me as an individual, string theory falls into that category. I'm glad there are some people investigating it, but the effort required for me to have anything but a superficial understanding of the topic is extremely unlikely to help me achieve anything.

I think you are approximately right here, but it's important to think about just how high that upper bound is, and what activities can only be accomplished by people above that bound. It might help to think in more concrete terms about what someone who believes in religion cannot achieve, that a non-believer can.

With sufficient compartmentalization of religious beliefs, I would venture to say the answer is a pretty small subset of activities. They may be important activities on a global scale, but mostly unimportant in peoples' day to day functioning.

It's very easy to imagine, or better yet, meet, theists who are far more rational in achieving their goals than even many of the people on this board.

Bobby Fischer, and a chess playing computer, highlight the difference between rationality and talent. Talent is simply the ability to do a particular task well. I tend to think of rationality as the ability to successfully apply one's talents to achieving one's reasonably complex goals. ("Reasonably complex" so the computer doesn't score very high on rationality for achieving it's one goal of winning chess games.)

Someone with limited talent could still be rational if he was making the best use of what strengths he did have. In a very real se... (read more)

I first learned how to touch type on Dvorak, but switched to qwerty when I went to college so I wouldn't have issues using other computers. I found that I could not maintain proficiency with both layouts. One skill just clobbered the other.

By interests, I mean concerns related to fulfilling values. For the time being, I consider human minds to be the only entities complex enough to have values. For example, it is very useful to model a cancer cell as having the goal of replicating, but I don't consider it to have replicating as a value.

The cancer example also shows that our own cells don't fulfill or share our values, and yet we still model the consumption of cancer cells as the consumption of a human being.

If you really want to ignore direct consumption by machines - and pretend that

Psychosurgery or pharmaceutical intervention to encourage some of the more positive autistic spectrum cognitive traits seems more likely to work than this. We are far from identifying the genetic basis of intelligence or exceptional intelligence, never mind an aspect as specific as rationality.

It's also not clear that it is in someone's self interest to do this. I know you said retroviral genetic engineering, but for now I'll assume that it would only be possible on embryos. In that case, if someone really wanted grand children, it is not clear that making these alterations in her children would be the best way to achieve that goal.

Would this analysis apply to the ecosystem as a whole? Should we think of fungus as consuming low entropy plant waste and spitting out higher entropy waste products? Is a squirrel eating an acorn part of the economy?

Machines, as they currently exists, have no interests of their own. Any "interests" they may appear to have are as real as the "interest" gas molecules have in occupying a larger volume when the temperature increases. Computer viruses are simply a way that machines malfunction. The fact that machines are not exclusively on our side simply means that they do not perfectly fulfill our values. Nothing does.

So, if say a million people owned all of the machines in the world, and they had no use for the human labor of the other billions of people in the world, you would still classify the economy as very effective?

I guess the question is what counts as an economic crash? A million extremely well off people with machines to tend to their every need and billions with no useful skills to acquire capital seems like a crash to most of the people involved.

At this point I was mostly wondering if there were any motivating anecdotes such as Phineas Gage or gourmand syndrome, except with a noticeable personality change towards rationality. Someone changing his political orientation, becoming less superstitious, or gambling less as a result of an injury could be useful (and, as a caveat, all could be caused by damage that has nothing to do with rationality).

I realize that "brain module" != "distinct patch of cortex real estate", but have there been any cases of brain damage that have increased a person's rationality in some areas?
I am aware that depression and certain autism spectrum traits have this property, but I'm curious if physical trauma has done anything similar.

For the time being, I'll just consider literacy as a binary quality, leaving aside differences in ability. In developed countries, with literacy rates around 99%, literacy is probably some what heritable because that <1% cannot read because of some sort of learning defect with a heritable component.

In Mail, with a 26.2% literacy rate, literacy is not very heritable. The illiterate there are a consequence of lack of educational opportunities. I think that the situation we are in regarding the phenotype of "rational" is closer to the Mali scenario rather than the developed world scenario.

For heritability, I think rationality is closer to reading than it is to intelligence.

I would place 0 value on creating identical non-interacting copies of myself. However, I would place a negative value on creating copies of my loved ones who were suffering because I got blown up by a grenade. If Sly is using the same reasoning, I think he should charge me with attempted murder.

That would be interesting. I'm not quite sure how it would work though. I guess examples of appropriate questions and inappropriate questions (as the proposal requires) would help to clarify the purpose of a RationalityOverflow.

I think discussion of talent is generally lacking from rationality. Some clearly very irrational people are extremely successful. Sometimes it is due to luck, but even then it is usually the case that a large amount of talent was necessary to enter the lottery. With my particular combination of talents, no amount of learning the arts of rationality is going to turn me into a golfer like Tiger Woods or a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch.

The closest Roko's list comes to this sort of thing is microeconomics, which includes comparative advantage. Taking ... (read more)

The worst cooking I have ever had came from a person who seems to lack any sort of ability to criticize food. It's not that she didn't have the skill to be a good cook. She simply could not tell when her cooking was bad. Being a good critic is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.

It's not really all that simple, and it's domain specific, but having someone take the keyboard while pair programming helped to show me that one person in particular was far smarter than me. I was in a situation where I was just trying to keep up enough to catch the (very) occasional error.

The 32% number does seem low to me. Even if the number is more like two thirds of adults are capable of abstract reasoning, that still leaves enough people to explain the pen on the moon result.

Is compartmentalization applying concrete (and possibly incorrect?) reasoning to an area where the person making the accusation of compartmentalization thinks abstract reasoning should be used?

Someone posted a while back that only a third of adults are capable of abstract reasoning. I've had some trouble figuring out exactly it means to go through life without abstract reasoning. The "heavy boots" response is a good example.

Without abstract reasoning, it's not possible to form the kind of theories that would let you connect the behavior of a pen and an astronaut in a gravitational field. I agree that this is an example of lack of ability, not compartmentalization. Of course, scientists are capable of abstract reasoning, so its still possible to accuse them of compartmentalizing even after considering the survey results.

When we talk about the states of a microprocessor, what we care about are the contents of the registers, the cache, and the instructions in the pipeline. I'm not certain about the gigahertz level processors of today, but for the processors of 20 years ago, these states are completely stable in terms of changing the placement of one electron with non-relativistic energy levels.

Those processors operated at tens of megahertz. Are 100 Hz neurons so much more sensitive that the placement of a single electron has any effect on the mind states we care about?