It should be a Halt. Melt. Catch Fire. moment when your rationality workshop is somehow regularly crashing people’s easy-mode epistemics! To first-order, you should expect a successful rationality workshop to help people prone to psychosis.
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 for do 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 to 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 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.)
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, and often undershooting, not just our ambitions, but the more boring baselines.
Like, 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.
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 for do 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 to 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 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.)
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, and often undershooting, not just our ambitions, but the more boring baselines.
Like, 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.