Guess on why rationality is not more popular (there are no pamphlets)
First of all I should note that this post is just a guess! I have not run any experiments or anything.
But anyways my guess for why rationality is not more popular is that the current expositions are super long! Yudkowsky’s sequences are about length of the christian bible. CFAR’s workshops are 4.5 days.
I think something the length of a pamphlet that you could hand out to people would work better!
Just as an example I had Claude Fable 5 write two pamphlets. They look pretty fine to me as is, to be honest, but I’m not suggesting we use these exact ones. This is just to demonstrate the length and style I’m thinking of! In particular note how it quickly gets to some useful call-to-actions (page 7 of a pamphlet, which have much shorter pages than books).
Pamphlet for general audience
THINK BETTER
A Pocket Guide to Rationality
PAGE 1 — COVER
[Image: A simple, striking illustration of a human head in profile, with a lightbulb inside — but the lightbulb is drawn as a maze being solved, with a bright line tracing the correct path through it.]
THINK BETTER
Your brain is lying to you.
Here’s how to catch it.
A 5-minute introduction to the art of rationality
PAGE 2 — YOUR BRAIN HAS BUGS
You are running 200,000-year-old software.
Your brain evolved to keep you alive on the savanna — to spot predators, find food, and get along with your tribe. It did not evolve to evaluate medical studies, plan retirement savings, or figure out what’s true on the internet.
The result? Your brain takes shortcuts. Scientists call these cognitive biases, and everyone has them. A few examples:
Confirmation bias: You notice evidence that supports what you already believe — and ignore evidence that doesn’t.
The sunk cost fallacy: You keep going with a bad plan because you’ve “already invested so much.”
Overconfidence: When people say they’re “99% sure,” they’re wrong far more than 1% of the time.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: knowing about biases doesn’t make you immune. Everyone reading this list thinks “yeah, other people totally do that.”
That’s a bias too.
PAGE 3 — THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
[Image: A hand-drawn map next to an actual landscape, where the map clearly shows a bridge that doesn’t exist in the real landscape.]
Imagine navigating a city with a map. If your map is wrong, you don’t get where you’re going — no matter how much you like the map, no matter how long you’ve owned it, no matter how confident you feel.
Your beliefs are a map of reality. Reality is the territory.
Here’s the key insight of rationality:
What’s true is already true. Believing something harder doesn’t make it more real.
If your beliefs are wrong, you want to know. A wrong belief feels exactly like a right one from the inside — comfortable, obvious, certain. The only way to tell the difference is to actually check the territory.
Rationality is the skill of making your map match reality — especially when reality is inconvenient.
PAGE 4 — BELIEFS SHOULD PAY RENT
Ask yourself about any belief you hold:
“What do I expect to see if this is true? What would I see if it were false?”
If the answer is “I’d see the exact same things either way” — your belief isn’t doing anything. It’s a freeloader in your head.
Real beliefs make predictions. Real beliefs can be wrong. That’s not a weakness — that’s what makes them useful.
And here’s a habit worth stealing: think in probabilities, not certainties.
Instead of “I’m sure” or “no way,” try “I’d say 80% likely.” This does something magical: it lets you update. New evidence arrives, and instead of defending your position to the death, you just adjust the number.
You’re not “flip-flopping.” You’re learning. A person who never changes their mind isn’t strong — they’ve just stopped paying attention.
PAGE 5 — NOTICE WHEN YOU’RE CONFUSED
[Image: A person looking at a puzzle piece that clearly doesn’t fit the puzzle in front of them, with a thought bubble containing a question mark.]
You know that feeling when something doesn’t quite add up? A story that’s a little too convenient? An explanation that almost makes sense?
That feeling is precious. Don’t smooth it over.
Most people, when confused, quickly invent a story that makes the confusion go away. Rationalists train themselves to do the opposite: to stop and say, “Wait. Either this claim is false, or my model of the world is wrong. Which is it?”
Confusion is a signal that you’re about to learn something — if you don’t kill it first.
Related skill: notice when you’re rationalizing. There’s a difference between deciding based on reasons and deciding first, then hunting for reasons. They feel similar from the inside. One question that helps:
“If this evidence pointed the other way, would I change my mind?”
If the answer is no, the evidence was never the point.
PAGE 6 — RATIONALITY IS ABOUT WINNING
Let’s clear something up. Rationality is not:
❌ Being cold and emotionless
❌ Winning arguments and dunking on people
❌ Sounding smart or using big words
❌ Never trusting your gut
Rationality is systematically making better decisions — about your health, your money, your relationships, your life. Emotions are data. Intuitions are data. A rationalist uses everything available to figure out what’s true and choose what works.
If your “rationality” is making your life worse, it isn’t rationality. The point isn’t to seem reasonable. The point is to actually be right more often — and to actually achieve the things you care about.
Truth-seeking isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice. Which brings us to you.
PAGE 7 — START TODAY: FIVE THINGS TO ACTUALLY DO
Don’t just nod along. Reading about exercise doesn’t build muscle. Here is your workout:
1. Make a prediction this week. About anything — a game, the weather, whether your coworker will be late. Give it a percentage. Then check if you were right.
2. Ask “What would change my mind?” Pick one belief you hold strongly. Write down what evidence would convince you otherwise. If nothing could… sit with that.
3. Say “I was wrong” out loud. Next time you’re wrong about something — even something tiny — admit it plainly, without excuses. It gets easier. It’s a superpower.
4. Steelman someone you disagree with. Before arguing, state their position so well that they would say “yes, exactly.” You can’t honestly reject an idea you can’t accurately describe.
5. When you feel confused, pause. Don’t explain it away. Ask: “What’s actually going on here?”
PAGE 8 — BACK COVER
[Image: The same lightbulb-maze from the cover, but now with the path fully traced and the bulb glowing.]
You don’t need permission to think clearly.
You don’t need a degree, a book, or a group. You need the honest question, asked over and over:
“What do I actually know, and how do I know it?”
Every time you catch a bias, update a belief, or admit a mistake, your map of the world gets a little more accurate — and your decisions get a little bit better. It compounds.
Start now. Pick one belief you’re sure about, and ask yourself: how would I know if I were wrong?
That question is the whole practice.
The rest is just doing it again tomorrow.
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
Pamphlet for those who know high school algebra
THINK BETTER
A Field Guide to Upgrading Your Own Mind
— PAGE 1 (COVER) —
[Image: A stylized human head in profile, with the brain drawn as a machine full of gears — but one gear is visibly cracked. A hand holding a wrench reaches in to fix it.]
THINK BETTER
Your brain is the only tool you’ll ever use for everything.
Here’s how to sharpen it.
A five-minute introduction to rationality.
— PAGE 2 —
What Is Rationality?
Rationality isn’t about being cold, robotic, or “logical” in the Hollywood sense. It’s two simple things:
1. Epistemic rationality: Holding beliefs that match reality. Believing things because they are true, not because they are comfortable, popular, or what you’ve always believed.
2. Instrumental rationality: Actually achieving your goals. Making decisions that get you what you want — better health, better relationships, better work — instead of decisions that merely feel right.
Think of your beliefs as a map and the world as the territory. A map that doesn’t match the territory gets you lost — no matter how much you love the map.
Rationality is the art of drawing better maps.
— PAGE 3 —
The Bad News: Your Brain Ships With Bugs
Your brain evolved to survive on the savanna, not to evaluate insurance policies, news headlines, or medical studies. Decades of psychology research show that everyone — including you, including us — runs on buggy software:
Confirmation bias: You notice evidence that supports what you already believe and ignore evidence against it.
Motivated reasoning: When you want something to be true, you ask “Can I believe this?” When you don’t, you ask “Must I believe this?” Different standards, same brain.
Overconfidence: When people say they’re “99% sure,” they’re wrong far more than 1% of the time.
The sunk cost fallacy: You keep pouring time and money into failing projects because you’ve already poured in time and money.
[Image: A cartoon person confidently walking off a cliff while looking at a map that shows a bridge.]
You can’t delete these bugs. But you can learn to catch them running.
— PAGE 4 —
The Good News: Beliefs Can Be Measured
Here’s a mental upgrade you can install today: stop treating beliefs as true/false, and start treating them as probabilities.
Instead of “I know I’m right,” try “I’m about 80% confident.” This isn’t wishy-washy — it’s precise. It forces you to ask: would I bet on this? At what odds?
And when new evidence arrives, update. There’s even a formula for it (you’ve seen it in stats class — Bayes’ theorem):
P(belief | evidence) = P(evidence | belief) × P(belief) / P(evidence)
You don’t need to compute it exactly. The lesson is in its shape:
Evidence that’s likely if you’re right but unlikely if you’re wrong should move you a lot.
Evidence that’s likely either way should move you barely at all.
No evidence should move you to 0% or 100%. Certainty is a bug, not a feature.
Ask yourself: “What would I expect to see if I were wrong?” If the answer is “exactly what I’m seeing,” your evidence proves nothing.
— PAGE 5 —
Changing Your Mind Is a Skill (and a Victory)
Here’s the strange part: in our culture, changing your mind is treated as weakness. Flip-flopping. Losing the argument.
This is exactly backwards.
If you never change your mind, you never learn anything. Every time you update a belief to match the evidence, your map gets more accurate. That’s not losing — that’s the whole point.
Two habits to build:
Notice confusion. That tiny feeling of “huh, that’s weird” when something doesn’t quite fit? Don’t smooth over it. Confusion means your map and the territory disagree — and the territory is always right.
Ask: “What would change my mind?” If your answer is “nothing,” you don’t have a belief. You have an allegiance. A belief you can’t test isn’t knowledge — it’s furniture.
[Image: Two maps side by side. One is elegant and ornate but shows a road ending in a lake. The other is messy with eraser marks and corrections, but shows the actual bridge.]
— PAGE 6 —
The Toolbox: Five Techniques That Actually Work
1. The Outside View. Don’t ask “how do I feel about my plan?” Ask “how do projects like this one usually turn out?” Your kitchen renovation will probably run over budget — not because you’re bad at planning, but because almost all of them do.
2. Consider the opposite. Before finalizing a decision, spend two full minutes genuinely arguing the other side. Not a strawman — the strongest version of the case against you.
3. Make predictions. Write down what you expect to happen — with a probability — before you find out. It’s the only honest scoreboard for your judgment. (“I knew it all along” doesn’t count if you never wrote it down.)
4. The five-minute timer. Stuck on a problem? Set a timer and actually think about it for five minutes by the clock. Most people have never spent five uninterrupted minutes thinking about their biggest problem. Seriously. Try it.
5. Murphyjitsu. Before starting a plan, imagine it’s six months later and the plan has failed. What went wrong? Now you know what to fix — in advance.
— PAGE 7 —
Your Assignment Starts Now
Don’t file this pamphlet under “interesting ideas.” Rationality isn’t something you read about — it’s something you do. So do it. This week:
☐ Today: Pick one belief you hold strongly. Write down what evidence would change your mind. If you can’t think of any, sit with that.
☐ Tomorrow: Make three predictions about your week, with probabilities. (“70% the meeting runs late.”) Check them Sunday. Were your 70%s right about 70% of the time?
☐ This week: Catch yourself in one bias. Just one. Notice yourself dismissing an argument because of who said it, or defending a purchase because you already made it. You don’t have to fix it. Just notice it, and say to yourself: “There it is.”
☐ In your next disagreement: Before responding, restate the other person’s view so well that they say “yes, exactly.” Then respond. Watch what happens.
[Image: A checklist on a clipboard, with the first box being checked by a pencil.]
The goal isn’t to be right. The goal is to become someone who gets righter over time.
— PAGE 8 (BACK COVER) —
Cut Out and Keep: The Pocket Rationalist
[Image: A dashed “scissors” cut line surrounding the card below.]
Before believing, ask: “What would I expect to see if this were false?”
Before deciding, ask: “How do things like this usually go?”
Before arguing, ask: “What would change my mind?”
When surprised, say: “Huh — that’s confusing. Good.”
When wrong, say: “I was wrong. My map just got better.”
Your brain is the only tool you will ever use to make every decision of your life.
You just spent five minutes sharpening it.
Don’t stop.
Nah, it’s that many people are not rationality-shaped.
Mind space is vast, and probably most people are not shaped in a way that being a rationalist seems likely to be good for them. This is both a limitation of rationality as it exists (it’s a thing designed to appeal to a certain kind of smart nerd, not to appeal to a mass audience) and of people (many people just don’t care that much about truth or accurate predictions for their own sake, or if they do, they don’t care if it requires effort or is psychologically uncomfortable).
It doesn’t seem this way from the inside due to the typical mind fallacy. After all, it feels like rationality is really good for me, so it should be good for everyone! But this is just not true. For every person who would benefit from more rationality, there’s probably 3 who would be worse off if they were forced to interact with the rationality meme complex, not because the ideas are bad, but because they are framed in ways that would be psychologically destabilizing if they ever accepted them.
I understand this is confusing if it’s obvious to you that truth is the most import thing, but it’s similarly obvious to other people that love or harmony or some other ideal is the most important thing, they they will gladly sacrifice truth to get more of their preferred value, and there will be no convincing them you are right because they don’t share your prior on truth from the start.
But rationality is not one terminal value among love, harmony and many other. It is instrumental to reaching almost any value. If your terminal value is love or harmony, you still have to make tricky decisions on a regular basis, and without an accurate map of reality you risk taking the wrong decisions.
Truth is not some feel-good notion, it’s the thing that you ignore at your own risks.
It isn’t exactly safe for humans to ignore love and harmony, either.
But that is what will happen, once you lose sight of truth-seeking.
Back to antiquity, the virtue of prudentia has been recognised as the foundation upon which all other virtues stand. You cannot achieve anything unless you know what efforts will proceed towards that end, nor direct your efforts towards the good unless you can discern what is good.
The modern word “prudence” has a much more limited meaning than prudentia, but we have another word for it: “rationality”.
Did you plan to elaborate? Otherwise this looks a lot like an applause light.
Alas, sometimes truth makes it harder to find love and harmony, since truth can break social reality. I’m not saying that maybe after that breakage there isn’t a rebuilding that’s possible that would maybe even lead to more love and harmony, but it sometimes requires passing through a trough of less love and harmony, and many people refuse to do anything other than follow gradients to local maxima.
It’s true in theory that rationality is whatever helps you achieve your goals, but in practice the rationality community just does a lot of logic and conscious analysis. It’s a bunch of people who already think too much dedicating themselves to thinking even more, which is usually a mistake.
It wouldn’t have taken much of a shift for evolution to make us all hyper-logical and good at avoiding logical fallacies. Instead, it seems like evolution put those logical fallacies there in the first place because (for a being with bounded computation) the way normal non-rationalists think is a more rational way of thinking than the dominant LessWrong mode of thinking, most of the time. (In the sense that rationality is winning.)
I don’t think that’s what happened. I think evolution put us on the path to understanding the world around us. We became better at it that any other living being. Then at some point (recently from our point of view), culture became the driving force behind our progress. Without culture, maybe we’d have evolved to be better at avoiding logical fallacies, like you say, or maybe not. But evolution is too slow compared to culture, so from our historical point of view, our genome is stopped halfway towards rationality and if we want to get better we have to learn it individually. That doesn’t mean being halfway rational is an evolutionary optimum.
Page three does not match people’s lives experience. In social reality believing things harder together makes them more real.
That’s kind of the point of “map is not the territory”! We only experience the map directly, so we often don’t have a good concept of there existing a territory which is different.
(This metaphor is from Alfred Korzybski by the way; Claude just plagiarized it.)
rationalism’s biggest error is that we believe that we are some kind of coherent ideology, or set of methods, when in reality we are mostly a shared-interest and shared-personality subculture.
the kind of person who does not read excessively long blog posts of abstract pontifications is mostly by default not a rationalist (and by that, i don’t mean “not a good person”, nor “not a smart person”)
I’m currently reading through the sequences posts. I think quite a bit of it is irreducible complexity. There really are just that many cognitive biases in the human mind, and that many rationality techniques to help deal with them.
If someone really cared, they could probably compress the length of the reading material by half or so without leading to an unreasonably obtuse read, but that is still a lot of reading.
That might indeed be one of the reasons, but also I think there is just not that much evidence of x-rationality actually helping in real world for most people? There are examples about bitcoin, covid and AI, but being able to be right about something once in a decade doesn’t seem like enough justification to read the Sequences
(For the record, I’ve read Sequences, and HPMOR and planecrash and CFAR Handbook)
Perhaps, but surely it is enough justification to read a pamphlet! I don’t think you’d need to read all the sequences to predict things of COVID scale importance.
There’s a vast oversupply of pamphlet-sizes documents that claim to teach you those skills. How does this one rise above the noise enough for someone who isn’t already familiar with its ideas to bother reading it?
I like Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners as a shorter intro to ~ a quarter of the art
I like the idea. I’m sure there is a large number of people, who would be interested in these ideas but hasn’t been exposed to them. I would assume that pamphlets are used already but if they’re not that’s a massive advertising gap.
I want to establish a distinction.
There are ways that a complicated theory can be simplified while keeping all its value. The shift from Roman numerals to Indo-Arabic numerals is all benefits, it’s why kids nowadays can easily learn arithmetics that back in the time took a lifetime to master. Likewise, converting probabilities to odds when doing some bayesian calculations is a really neat trick with only upsides.
These tricks are rare, and require a deep understanding of the matter. Apart from these, any simplification is a shortcut that loses some of the message. The problem here is that at the center of rationality is precisely the act of catching your brain doing some shallow work and trying to go deeper instead. As such, there is a contradiction in trying to convey rationality through a flyer. The message (thinking is a serious matter) is at odds with the medium (here is the essence of dozens of articles of reflection in only 8 pages made of one-liners). I suspect that the medium would win.
I think that pamphlets aren’t that useful, and not just because of irreducible complexity described by @2001zhaozhao:
Research done by the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that in 2023 28% of Americans were functionally illiterate and that only 44% of American people aged between 16 and 65 had the highest literacy level.
To an outsider, a pamphlet is hard to distinguish from canvassing done by various self-improvement-related[1] groups, sects or even from sycophantic slop. Claude Fable 5′s pamphlet for those who know high school algebra outright ended with “You just spent five minutes sharpening it [your brain]. Don’t stop.”
Unlike @Mlxa’s idea that most people aren’t helped by x-rationality,[2] I believe that it’s just an extreme case of rationality in general, a successful generalisation of the scientific mindset or even common sense in general.
IIRC some novice rationalists have an erroneous idea that rationality itself grants the human user the ability to recursively self-improve, which I find unlikely. Self-improvement in a domain is bottlenecked on practice in said domain.
The cited examples are bitcoin, the COVID pandemic and AI. Unfortunately, I don’t have data on whether smart people unrelated to LW predicted the pandemic from the first messages. Bitcoins are closer to a zero-sum game which helped a few and harmed many others.
Hmm, seems like a bit of a leap to the conclusion based on those arguments. Surely there are a large number of people who are literate and like self-improvement groups, even if it isn’t 100% of the US population!
I guess for illiterate people they could watch How to systematically approach truth—Bayes’ rule by Rational Animations? (To be clear I think that’s a great video for anyone!) The main advantage of a pamphlet is that you can just hand it out, but I’m by no means advocating it as the sole form of promotion! (Or that the final pamphlet should be written by gen AI lol.)
I meant something like “It is genuinely hard to preach rationality to someone who is too stupid to understand anything science-like, believes that anything science-like is uncool, etc.”
i think it would be good for you to just try this, have some way for tracking it (doesnt need to be super precise, quick and actually done is better than super elaborate and not done here, imo), and see what happens!! i’m also curious!
You’d need a really weird distribution of literacy levels for the number to be higher than 44%. I mean, do even 44% of people have the highest income level or the highest age level?
If you look at their chart you’ll see they only consider 3 different literacy levels. Maybe that means the default expectation is 33% or something like that, but it’s not the same as “highest income level” or “highest age level”.
who said mass adoption was a goal?
I say this with medium high respect, it’s in no small part because we are generally insufferable. Unfortunately this is not a joke. Tone, not content, and I wouldn’t try to overcome it, that would just make things worse.