Well, we don’t get to see the parallel timeline, so it is difficult to say precisely what is the difference. Intuitively, I compare the previous state to the current state, but that assumes that in the parallel timeline “nothing happened”. Perhaps other interesting things have happened there.
The most obvious change in my behavior immediately after reading the Sequences: I stopped debating politics online. (Previously I wasted a lot of time doing that. Although now I am spending that much time on LW and ACX.) Suddenly, debating politics online felt like talking to retards: people were making the same obvious mistakes over and over again with no intention to ever learn. I think this was good for my mental health.
I have also met a few friends in the rationalist community. As a result of our discussions I started to care about my health more, and bought some bitcoins. I think some of these things would not happen in most of the parallel timelines. I probably use AIs a bit more and better than I would without reading LW.
I wish I had some more impressive results, but I am happy even for these improvements. (My excuse is that I have small kids and the community in this part of the world is very small. My benefits seem to come mostly as a result of interacting with other rationalists. I guess it is much easier for me to take ideas seriously when I also receive some social support for that. Reading alone does not have the same effect.)
I know some people who met each other on LW meetups, started doing some crypto business together, now they are rich and… moved away and I lost regular contact with them, sadly. I am not saying here that crypto = rationality. But it was the rationalist community that allowed them to meet each other: smart people who share some perspective and can trust each other’s sanity.
Across the world, I think Scott Alexander has benefited a lot from the community. It would make more sense to ask him what specifically he attributes to it.
I think there’s also two ways to break down the sanity project, which is one- can you make a receptive audience rational or improve their lives through rationality, and two, can you raise the societal sanity waterline, like make the average person saner.
In my case (not sure how typical), the greatest value seems to come from small local groups. Local, because meeting people in real life seems better than chatting with them online; our monkey brains treat we meet as “more real” than the ones who only seem to exist on the screen. (That’s probably a good intuition for the era of online bots.)
There is a lot of value in taking five minutes by the clock to actually think about a problem. I think there is even more value in taking fifteen minutes to talk about a problem with your trusted fellow rationalist friends. There is something powerful in having people whose opinion you can trust, who practice some basic epistemic hygiene so that their advice does not contain things like “you have to pray” or “that’s fate” or “hey, try this scam I found online, it will totally work”.
I’m interested in the model where schools are generally a big cause of the problem of societal irrationality, but that doesn’t seem like something people talk about much in this community.
There are many articles about education, many of them critical. (It’s just difficult to find them among all those AI-related posts.) I think the consensus is that schools are mostly a waste of time, a very costly signal of conformity that many employers want.
(I don’t think this is a complete waste. There are people who are unable to keep a job because they are simply unable to wake up and come to the job every day consistently. The society benefits from a mechanism that trains them and certifies this. It’s just a huge waste of time for everyone smarter and more disciplined than that. Without the school system the society would probably split to a small group of homeschooled geniuses, a medium-sized of kids with mixed results approximately as good as they have now, and the largest group of completely unemployable idiots at the bottom. So far, we still the people at the bottom to be able to get jobs. Also, the idea of even stupider voters in democracy is scary.)
The perspective of school not merely as a waste of time but actively harmful… well, there is the “teacher’s password” anti-pattern, but I do not remember anything more in this direction.
Well, we don’t get to see the parallel timeline, so it is difficult to say precisely what is the difference. Intuitively, I compare the previous state to the current state, but that assumes that in the parallel timeline “nothing happened”. Perhaps other interesting things have happened there.
The most obvious change in my behavior immediately after reading the Sequences: I stopped debating politics online. (Previously I wasted a lot of time doing that. Although now I am spending that much time on LW and ACX.) Suddenly, debating politics online felt like talking to retards: people were making the same obvious mistakes over and over again with no intention to ever learn. I think this was good for my mental health.
I have also met a few friends in the rationalist community. As a result of our discussions I started to care about my health more, and bought some bitcoins. I think some of these things would not happen in most of the parallel timelines. I probably use AIs a bit more and better than I would without reading LW.
I wish I had some more impressive results, but I am happy even for these improvements. (My excuse is that I have small kids and the community in this part of the world is very small. My benefits seem to come mostly as a result of interacting with other rationalists. I guess it is much easier for me to take ideas seriously when I also receive some social support for that. Reading alone does not have the same effect.)
I know some people who met each other on LW meetups, started doing some crypto business together, now they are rich and… moved away and I lost regular contact with them, sadly. I am not saying here that crypto = rationality. But it was the rationalist community that allowed them to meet each other: smart people who share some perspective and can trust each other’s sanity.
Across the world, I think Scott Alexander has benefited a lot from the community. It would make more sense to ask him what specifically he attributes to it.
In my case (not sure how typical), the greatest value seems to come from small local groups. Local, because meeting people in real life seems better than chatting with them online; our monkey brains treat we meet as “more real” than the ones who only seem to exist on the screen. (That’s probably a good intuition for the era of online bots.)
There is a lot of value in taking five minutes by the clock to actually think about a problem. I think there is even more value in taking fifteen minutes to talk about a problem with your trusted fellow rationalist friends. There is something powerful in having people whose opinion you can trust, who practice some basic epistemic hygiene so that their advice does not contain things like “you have to pray” or “that’s fate” or “hey, try this scam I found online, it will totally work”.
There are many articles about education, many of them critical. (It’s just difficult to find them among all those AI-related posts.) I think the consensus is that schools are mostly a waste of time, a very costly signal of conformity that many employers want.
(I don’t think this is a complete waste. There are people who are unable to keep a job because they are simply unable to wake up and come to the job every day consistently. The society benefits from a mechanism that trains them and certifies this. It’s just a huge waste of time for everyone smarter and more disciplined than that. Without the school system the society would probably split to a small group of homeschooled geniuses, a medium-sized of kids with mixed results approximately as good as they have now, and the largest group of completely unemployable idiots at the bottom. So far, we still the people at the bottom to be able to get jobs. Also, the idea of even stupider voters in democracy is scary.)
The perspective of school not merely as a waste of time but actively harmful… well, there is the “teacher’s password” anti-pattern, but I do not remember anything more in this direction.