Adele arguedrecently that a rationality curriculum worthy of the name would leave folks less vulnerable to psychosis, and that many current rationalists (CFAR alums and otherwise) are appallingly vulnerable to psychosis. After thinking about it some, I agree.
I want to quote (and endorse, and claim as important) the start of @Eli Tyre’s reply at the time:
For what it’s worth, I think this is directionally correct, and important, but I don’t necessarily buy it as worded.
Sometimes advanced techniques / tools allow power users to do more than they otherwise would be able to, but also break basic-level stuff for less advanced users. There are some people that are able to get a lot more out of their computers with a Linux install, and also, for most people, trying to use and work with Linux can totally interfere with pretty basic stuff that that “just worked” when using windows, or (if you do it wrong) just break your machine, without having the tools to fix it.
It’s correspondingly not that surprising to me if power tools for making big changes to people’s epistemologies sometimes have the effect of making some people worse at the basics. (Though obviously, if this is the case, a huge priority needs to be attending to and mitigating this dynamic.)
… actually, the rest of that reply is a good comment on “ambiguous impact on health”:
That said, I think that the rationality project broadly construed has often fallen into a failure mode of trying to do radically ambitious stuff without first solidly mastering the boring and bog standard basics. This led to often undershooting, not just our ambitions, but the more boring baselines.
We aimed to be faster than science. But, in practice, I think we often didn’t meet the epistemic standards of a reasonably healthy scientific subfield.
If I invest substantial effort in rationality development in the future, I intend to first focus on doing the basics really well before trying for superhuman rationality.
I want to quote (and endorse, and claim as important) the start of @Eli Tyre’s reply at the time:
… actually, the rest of that reply is a good comment on “ambiguous impact on health”:
FYI, that comment had a number of typos that I’ve just corrected, on the original version.