Epistemic status: Believed, but hard to know how much to adjust for opportunity costs
I’m wondering whether stand-up comedy would be a good way to expand and test one’s “rationality skills” and/or just general interaction skills. One thing I like about it is that you get immediate feedback: the audience either laughs at your joke, or they don’t.
For my postgraduate work, I went to London, where I studied physics and neuroscience at King’s College, and obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics. For a while I did a little bit stand-up comedy on the vibrant London pub and theatre circuit.
Comedy as Anti-Compartmentalization—Another pet theory of mine. I was puzzled by the amount of atheist comedians out there, who people pay to see tell them that their religion is absurd. (Yes, Christian comedians exist too. Search YouTube. I dare you.) So my theory is that humour serves as a space where patterns and data from different fields are allowed to be superimposed on one another. Think of it as an anti-compartmentalization habit. Due to our brain design, compartmentalization is the default, so humour may be a hack to counter that. And we reward those who do it well with high status because it’s valuable. Maybe we should have transhumanist/rationalist stand-up comedians? We sure have a lot of inconsistencies to point out.
Stand-up comedy as a way to improve rationality skills
Epistemic status: Believed, but hard to know how much to adjust for opportunity costs
I’m wondering whether stand-up comedy would be a good way to expand and test one’s “rationality skills” and/or just general interaction skills. One thing I like about it is that you get immediate feedback: the audience either laughs at your joke, or they don’t.
Prominent existential risk researcher Nick Bostrom used to be a stand-up comedian:
For my postgraduate work, I went to London, where I studied physics and neuroscience at King’s College, and obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics. For a while I did a little bit stand-up comedy on the vibrant London pub and theatre circuit.
It was also mentioned at the London LW meetup in June 2011:
Comedy as Anti-Compartmentalization—Another pet theory of mine. I was puzzled by the amount of atheist comedians out there, who people pay to see tell them that their religion is absurd. (Yes, Christian comedians exist too. Search YouTube. I dare you.) So my theory is that humour serves as a space where patterns and data from different fields are allowed to be superimposed on one another. Think of it as an anti-compartmentalization habit. Due to our brain design, compartmentalization is the default, so humour may be a hack to counter that. And we reward those who do it well with high status because it’s valuable. Maybe we should have transhumanist/rationalist stand-up comedians? We sure have a lot of inconsistencies to point out.
Diego Caliero thinks that there would be good material to draw upon from the rationalist community.
Does anyone have any experience trying this and/or have thoughts on whether it would be useful? Also, does anyone in NYC want to try it out?