Every now and then, someone asks why the people who call themselves “rationalists” don’t always seem to do all that much better in life
I think this is because, while we have lots of useful theory and advice here about epistemic rationalism, we have virtually nothing about instrumental rationalism.
1. Success requires taking action, and taking action requires generating options, and I’m not very good at generating options. Little in the way of advice for doing it is given in Rationality A-Z (at least up to this point) beyond “spend a few minutes thinking about it, if it’s important.” It’s good advice, but seems insufficient. (I would kind of expect a leading expert in AGIs to have more ideas about this problem—or are the techniques used by AIs inapplicable to humans?)
2. Motivation is perhaps a larger problem for me. I don’t know how motivation works and how to create it in myself; in theory there is a thing I want to create more than anything else in the world; in practice I just haven’t felt like doing it for several weeks (perhaps this is because I anticipate no one will see its utility and almost everyone will ignore it as they have in the past, but actually the rationale lies in my emotional system, it cannot be introspected, and sometimes my feelings change so I can work on it again.) “Shut up and do the impossible!”, says the next post, but this requires quite some motivation.
3. A lot of success in life depends on our relationships with others, and I’ve never been good at developing relationships, nor has there been much advice about that here. I don’t know any aspiring rationalists in person, and I find the poor reasoning of most people to be grating. I can’t use terms like “expected value” with others and expect to be understood. Succeeding at standard non-rationalist office politics is one of those things that I’d love to do in theory, but in practice it’s unpredictable and mysterious and scary and I lack the will to take the necessary risks (especially having lost my last two jobs, I really want something stable at the moment). I might worry that I’ll never be more than a low-level employee, if it would do any good to worry. I often lament that I play the role of a “leaf node” in the game of life—a person no one pays much attention to—but I simply don’t know how to fix the problem.
Bayesians with the same priors cannot agree to disagree, is a believing Orthodox Jew.
The facile explanation is that people compartmentalize and have biases, but this reminds me, where do priors come from? So far I have not seen any proposals for how to evaluate evidence in a new area of study, let alone how to evaluate evidence “from scratch”.
I think this is because, while we have lots of useful theory and advice here about epistemic rationalism, we have virtually nothing about instrumental rationalism.
1. Success requires taking action, and taking action requires generating options, and I’m not very good at generating options. Little in the way of advice for doing it is given in Rationality A-Z (at least up to this point) beyond “spend a few minutes thinking about it, if it’s important.” It’s good advice, but seems insufficient. (I would kind of expect a leading expert in AGIs to have more ideas about this problem—or are the techniques used by AIs inapplicable to humans?)
2. Motivation is perhaps a larger problem for me. I don’t know how motivation works and how to create it in myself; in theory there is a thing I want to create more than anything else in the world; in practice I just haven’t felt like doing it for several weeks (perhaps this is because I anticipate no one will see its utility and almost everyone will ignore it as they have in the past, but actually the rationale lies in my emotional system, it cannot be introspected, and sometimes my feelings change so I can work on it again.) “Shut up and do the impossible!”, says the next post, but this requires quite some motivation.
3. A lot of success in life depends on our relationships with others, and I’ve never been good at developing relationships, nor has there been much advice about that here. I don’t know any aspiring rationalists in person, and I find the poor reasoning of most people to be grating. I can’t use terms like “expected value” with others and expect to be understood. Succeeding at standard non-rationalist office politics is one of those things that I’d love to do in theory, but in practice it’s unpredictable and mysterious and scary and I lack the will to take the necessary risks (especially having lost my last two jobs, I really want something stable at the moment). I might worry that I’ll never be more than a low-level employee, if it would do any good to worry. I often lament that I play the role of a “leaf node” in the game of life—a person no one pays much attention to—but I simply don’t know how to fix the problem.
The facile explanation is that people compartmentalize and have biases, but this reminds me, where do priors come from? So far I have not seen any proposals for how to evaluate evidence in a new area of study, let alone how to evaluate evidence “from scratch”.