Clarified in the edit. This site very much focusses on choosing rationally (between very few options), what one should believe, and such. If you want to achieve your goals, you need to get better at problem solving, which you do by solving various problems (duh). Problem solving involves picking something good out of a space of enormous number of possibilities.
You guys seriously should invest in general problem solving exercises.
Would just googling “problem solving exercises” be enough? What are you talking about, exactly?
I think what Dmytry is talking about is that Less Wrong does not stand up to its goals.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote that rationality is just the label he uses for his “beliefs about the winning Way—the Way of the agent smiling from on top of the giant heap of utility.”
Wouldn’t it make sense to assess if you are actually winning by solving problems or getting rich etc.? At least if there is more to “raising the sanity waterline” than epistemic rationality, if it is actually supposed to be instrumentally useful.
Yea, basically that. Every fool can make correct choice between two alternatives with a little luck and a coin toss. Every other fool can get it by looking at first fool. You gets heaps of utility by looking in giant solution spaces where this doesn’t work. You don’t get a whole lot by focussing all your intellectual might on doing something that fools do well enough.
See, Eliezer grew up in religious family, and his idea of intelligence is choosing the correct beliefs. I grew up in poor family; my idea of intelligence is much more along the lines of actually succeeding via finding solutions to practical problems. Nobody’s going to pay you just because you correctly don’t believe in God. Not falling for the sunk cost fallacy at very best gets you to square 1 with lower losses—that’s great, and laudable, and is better than sinking more costs, but it’s only microscopic piece of problem solving. The largest failure of reasoning is failure to even get a glimpse at the winning option, because its lost inside huge space.
Would just googling “problem solving exercises” be enough? What are you talking about, exactly?
Clarified in the edit. This site very much focusses on choosing rationally (between very few options), what one should believe, and such. If you want to achieve your goals, you need to get better at problem solving, which you do by solving various problems (duh). Problem solving involves picking something good out of a space of enormous number of possibilities.
I think what Dmytry is talking about is that Less Wrong does not stand up to its goals.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote that rationality is just the label he uses for his “beliefs about the winning Way—the Way of the agent smiling from on top of the giant heap of utility.”
Wouldn’t it make sense to assess if you are actually winning by solving problems or getting rich etc.? At least if there is more to “raising the sanity waterline” than epistemic rationality, if it is actually supposed to be instrumentally useful.
Yea, basically that. Every fool can make correct choice between two alternatives with a little luck and a coin toss. Every other fool can get it by looking at first fool. You gets heaps of utility by looking in giant solution spaces where this doesn’t work. You don’t get a whole lot by focussing all your intellectual might on doing something that fools do well enough.
See, Eliezer grew up in religious family, and his idea of intelligence is choosing the correct beliefs. I grew up in poor family; my idea of intelligence is much more along the lines of actually succeeding via finding solutions to practical problems. Nobody’s going to pay you just because you correctly don’t believe in God. Not falling for the sunk cost fallacy at very best gets you to square 1 with lower losses—that’s great, and laudable, and is better than sinking more costs, but it’s only microscopic piece of problem solving. The largest failure of reasoning is failure to even get a glimpse at the winning option, because its lost inside huge space.
Isn’t this being done?