Even if a skill isn’t as useful if you’re the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don’t have it.
Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I’m pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It’s also a small argument in favour of following a textbook; mandatory education is one of society’s big shots on putting skills in everyone’s heads and it might not be worth (making numbers up) a 50% boost to this one classroom overall if it means they happen to miss a particular skill that the rest of society is going to expect everyone to have. Still, that side of things is more tentative.
(One of my favourite questions to ask rationalists is “if you could pick one rationalist skill and make it as common as literacy, what do you pick?”)
Even if a skill isn’t as useful if you’re the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don’t have it.
Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I’m pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It’s also a small argument in favour of following a textbook; mandatory education is one of society’s big shots on putting skills in everyone’s heads and it might not be worth (making numbers up) a 50% boost to this one classroom overall if it means they happen to miss a particular skill that the rest of society is going to expect everyone to have. Still, that side of things is more tentative.
(One of my favourite questions to ask rationalists is “if you could pick one rationalist skill and make it as common as literacy, what do you pick?”)