Unfortunately, the majority of smart people don’t believe that improving their own rationality is worthwhile (related to point 1 above).
The phrasing you use implies a conscious decision. In an over the top manner you might imagine a person who gets mind-saved, trained into rationality+, presented with all the data on how that influences their lives, and then decides to get memory wiped back to the safe point (and time transfered too). That would be a conscious decision under full information. Obviously that is not the case.
I think that the idea that there is more in the world that is amazing and useful and worthwhile to learn is not particularly widespread.
So any information about this topic gets possibly discarded by the very same system it tries to improve. A bit of a bootstrapping problem.
You might get around that by carefully selecting people with good preconditions, or by a wide spread of the material.
The rest of the world might only notice if many of those who participates a certain training becomes successful, and if many of the successful people did a certain training program.
More simply, I believe that most smart people when asked, would say that they are already rational, and not realize that there a great many degrees of rationality and that they probably have subconscious biases working against them.
The phrasing you use implies a conscious decision.
I think it is safe to say that when the issue comes up for consideration, most smart people make a conscious decision not to waste time improving their rationality. It may not be the best possible decision, but we rarely make the very best possible decision.
The idea that there is more in the world that is amazing and useful and worthwhile to learn is not particularly widespread.
I think many smart people continue to learn new things about the world. This doesn’t generally translate into improving their rationality.
The phrasing you use implies a conscious decision. In an over the top manner you might imagine a person who gets mind-saved, trained into rationality+, presented with all the data on how that influences their lives, and then decides to get memory wiped back to the safe point (and time transfered too). That would be a conscious decision under full information. Obviously that is not the case. I think that the idea that there is more in the world that is amazing and useful and worthwhile to learn is not particularly widespread. So any information about this topic gets possibly discarded by the very same system it tries to improve. A bit of a bootstrapping problem. You might get around that by carefully selecting people with good preconditions, or by a wide spread of the material. The rest of the world might only notice if many of those who participates a certain training becomes successful, and if many of the successful people did a certain training program.
More simply, I believe that most smart people when asked, would say that they are already rational, and not realize that there a great many degrees of rationality and that they probably have subconscious biases working against them.
being aware of what you do not know times a hundred
I think it is safe to say that when the issue comes up for consideration, most smart people make a conscious decision not to waste time improving their rationality. It may not be the best possible decision, but we rarely make the very best possible decision.
I think many smart people continue to learn new things about the world. This doesn’t generally translate into improving their rationality.