You can politely ask rationalist questions when someone says something irrational. Don’t forget to smile!
You can write letters to the editor of your local newspaper to correct faulty reasoning.
You can visit random blogs, find an error in reasoning, offer a polite correction, and link back to a few relevant Less Wrong posts.
I don’t believe these are seeds, such actions don’t leave lasting impression that grows under its own power. A lot of energy can be spent in vain correcting specific errors in people who won’t take a hint. It might be much more effective to focus on educating people who can actually be expected to make rationality one of the guiding principles in their lives, learning more themselves than an occasional correction by others allows, and some of whom would spend energy propagating the meme.
A textbook on rationality, a rationality seminar, or advertising thereof would be seeds, but probably not arguing with random people who are wrong.
Most seeds planted don’t grow into mature trees. It takes more than a handful of seeds to get a good chance of a self sustaining community of plants, it takes extensive cultivation, or a fair amount of luck.
Most seeds planted don’t grow into mature trees. It takes more than a handful of seeds to get a good chance of a self sustaining community of plants, it takes extensive cultivation, or a fair amount of luck.
Fortunately with the right level of memetic potency a seed planted in a fertile mind may yield thirty, sixty or a hundredfold!
We must, however, acknowledge that a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic. Let he who as ears to hear (and weak ability for compartmentalism and a dysfunctional sincere-hypocrisy system) let him hear!
EDIT: Drat, beaten to it with respect to allusion to prior usage. I’ll leave the comment here for the claim with respect to genetics.
Well technically not. It may not be an entirely free country but it is certainly a free universe. There is nothing saying we must arrive at any particular conclusion based off any given set of evidence. There isn’t even a rule saying that reaching correct conclusions will always be a competitive advantage. This is what allows certain kinds of non-rational thinking to be viable strategic options or viable ‘personalities’.
What is the evidence?
When asked that question I typically have a low expectation that evidence really has anything to do with it. I do not want to write a post on psychology and personality at this time so I will leave people to reach their own conclusion based on their own familiarity with psychology (or exposure to humans).
You doubt my good faith; I must doubt yours in interpreting the word “must” in a sense irrelevant to the context. I meant “must” in exactly the sense in which I interpreted you as meaning “must”: that is, that the evidence is so strong that it would be irrational not to be substantially moved by it.
When asked that question I typically have a low expectation that evidence really has anything to do with it.
Whether you choose to write anything further on the subject is up to you, but please revise your expectation of my good faith upwards.
A “tendency towards rationality” is not the same thing as IQ, nor does it resemble even slightly any of the “big five” personality traits, so any findings on the heritability of those characteristics would not be to the point. How does one even define or measure “a tendency towards rationality” to the standard required, and who has done so? If everyday observation suggests that rationality runs in families, that is insufficient to determine whether genes or upbringing were more important.
Seeing no particular reason to expect that “a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic”, and seeing you assert it so strongly, I asked why.
Neither of us are acting in bad faith. I think I was fairly straight with “disagree with your implication except for the technical meaning which is an ironic segue”. You were fairly clear too. It is just the way people talk.
From that beginning the best outcome we could expect is to end up arguing about definitions of rationality or straight contradictions on whether the known correlations between cognitive traits are ‘rationality’ related. Why go there?
Studies linking common traits related to interaction with authorities with respect to beliefs.
High correlation of extraversion with conformist thinking
Relevance of both of the above to tendencies toward prioritising epistemic rationality.
Game theoretic incentives for adopting certain signalling strategies based off various social niches.
IQ: relevant.
Big Five: even more relevant. Openness to experience in particular. Extraversion is relevant via the previous mentioned conformist tendencies.
It’s about personality. Personality is overwhelmingly dominated by genetic factors.
Have you seen the children of engineers and scientists? Seriously, how is this not obvious?
Epistemic rationality is basically a mental defect. Sure, maybe not in existential terms. But certainly in the “He who dies with the most toys wins (and probably got laid more)” sense. Thinking rationally just isn’t much of a recipe for conventional success. Vulnerability to overemphasising abstract thought over primate political thought is rather closely related to tendencies towards Asperger’s. And even at the sub-diagnostic level nerds that breed are more likely to produce offspring that are diagnosable. Somewhere along that spectrum there is a maximum likelyhood of catching rationalism.
Rational thinking is nerdy. Nerdiness is heritable.
If you could on the children of engineers/scientists thing, that’d be interesting. I don’t know how useful it’d be because I imagine it’d boil down to them being much nerdier than the children of equivalently intelligent groups, such as lawyers, Arts professors or journalists.
This would make a staggeringly excellent paper/thesis and if one were really ambitious one could also include accountants and teachers, who could be further divided by subject.
The easiest way for a current student to do this would be to try and get data on the adult children of all permanent tenured staff at their university.
I know. That’s what I was trying to avoid doing. But you could take it up. ;)
Your other ideas sound interesting too. But more in the “good subject for a PhD thesis” than good subject for a post. That would be a lot of work to acquire the data, analyse it suitably and write up all the various implications. Come to think of it it would be in the top 10 broad research areas that I’d be interested in following up. (And I would perhaps even have an ethical obligation to follow that research up with a covert ‘evil mastermind’ type eugenics program.)
For my part I am not sure how confident I could be of differences between, say, lawyer’s children and engineer’s children, after controlling for intelligence. Probably some but it’d take a whole lot of data to find significance. Journalists? Who knows. They could even be more susceptible to rationality than engineers for all I know. Potentially contrarian truth seeking is not out of place in a journalist.
I’m more comfortable with making estimates based on the groups that imply serious differences in personality. For example, marketers, ‘Desperate Housewives’ type socialites and human resources middle managers, all after controlling for IQ. Certain kinds of biased thinking are a competitive advantage in those environments.
I agree. Doing the kind of thing that lukeprog is talking about would be more akin creating the environment where stem cells specialize into skin, bone or muscle cells. We would be creating an environment that rewards rationality, which would guide them into morphing into more rational people.
Is speculating on whether a metaphor is suitable an appropriate topic for Less Wrong?
I don’t believe these are seeds, such actions don’t leave lasting impression that grows under its own power. A lot of energy can be spent in vain correcting specific errors in people who won’t take a hint. It might be much more effective to focus on educating people who can actually be expected to make rationality one of the guiding principles in their lives, learning more themselves than an occasional correction by others allows, and some of whom would spend energy propagating the meme.
A textbook on rationality, a rationality seminar, or advertising thereof would be seeds, but probably not arguing with random people who are wrong.
Most seeds planted don’t grow into mature trees. It takes more than a handful of seeds to get a good chance of a self sustaining community of plants, it takes extensive cultivation, or a fair amount of luck.
You can drag a horse to water, but you cannot make it study the science of liquid nutrients.
Fortunately with the right level of memetic potency a seed planted in a fertile mind may yield thirty, sixty or a hundredfold!
We must, however, acknowledge that a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic. Let he who as ears to hear (and weak ability for compartmentalism and a dysfunctional sincere-hypocrisy system) let him hear!
EDIT: Drat, beaten to it with respect to allusion to prior usage. I’ll leave the comment here for the claim with respect to genetics.
Must we? What is the evidence?
Well technically not. It may not be an entirely free country but it is certainly a free universe. There is nothing saying we must arrive at any particular conclusion based off any given set of evidence. There isn’t even a rule saying that reaching correct conclusions will always be a competitive advantage. This is what allows certain kinds of non-rational thinking to be viable strategic options or viable ‘personalities’.
When asked that question I typically have a low expectation that evidence really has anything to do with it. I do not want to write a post on psychology and personality at this time so I will leave people to reach their own conclusion based on their own familiarity with psychology (or exposure to humans).
You doubt my good faith; I must doubt yours in interpreting the word “must” in a sense irrelevant to the context. I meant “must” in exactly the sense in which I interpreted you as meaning “must”: that is, that the evidence is so strong that it would be irrational not to be substantially moved by it.
Whether you choose to write anything further on the subject is up to you, but please revise your expectation of my good faith upwards.
A “tendency towards rationality” is not the same thing as IQ, nor does it resemble even slightly any of the “big five” personality traits, so any findings on the heritability of those characteristics would not be to the point. How does one even define or measure “a tendency towards rationality” to the standard required, and who has done so? If everyday observation suggests that rationality runs in families, that is insufficient to determine whether genes or upbringing were more important.
Seeing no particular reason to expect that “a tendency towards rationality is to a large extent genetic”, and seeing you assert it so strongly, I asked why.
Neither of us are acting in bad faith. I think I was fairly straight with “disagree with your implication except for the technical meaning which is an ironic segue”. You were fairly clear too. It is just the way people talk.
From that beginning the best outcome we could expect is to end up arguing about definitions of rationality or straight contradictions on whether the known correlations between cognitive traits are ‘rationality’ related. Why go there?
Couldn’t you just briefly explain your reasoning?
I like the way you asked a question there.
Studies linking common traits related to interaction with authorities with respect to beliefs.
High correlation of extraversion with conformist thinking
Relevance of both of the above to tendencies toward prioritising epistemic rationality.
Game theoretic incentives for adopting certain signalling strategies based off various social niches.
IQ: relevant.
Big Five: even more relevant. Openness to experience in particular. Extraversion is relevant via the previous mentioned conformist tendencies.
It’s about personality. Personality is overwhelmingly dominated by genetic factors.
Have you seen the children of engineers and scientists? Seriously, how is this not obvious?
Epistemic rationality is basically a mental defect. Sure, maybe not in existential terms. But certainly in the “He who dies with the most toys wins (and probably got laid more)” sense. Thinking rationally just isn’t much of a recipe for conventional success. Vulnerability to overemphasising abstract thought over primate political thought is rather closely related to tendencies towards Asperger’s. And even at the sub-diagnostic level nerds that breed are more likely to produce offspring that are diagnosable. Somewhere along that spectrum there is a maximum likelyhood of catching rationalism.
Rational thinking is nerdy. Nerdiness is heritable.
This has the makings of an excellent post.
If you could on the children of engineers/scientists thing, that’d be interesting. I don’t know how useful it’d be because I imagine it’d boil down to them being much nerdier than the children of equivalently intelligent groups, such as lawyers, Arts professors or journalists.
This would make a staggeringly excellent paper/thesis and if one were really ambitious one could also include accountants and teachers, who could be further divided by subject.
The easiest way for a current student to do this would be to try and get data on the adult children of all permanent tenured staff at their university.
I know. That’s what I was trying to avoid doing. But you could take it up. ;)
Your other ideas sound interesting too. But more in the “good subject for a PhD thesis” than good subject for a post. That would be a lot of work to acquire the data, analyse it suitably and write up all the various implications. Come to think of it it would be in the top 10 broad research areas that I’d be interested in following up. (And I would perhaps even have an ethical obligation to follow that research up with a covert ‘evil mastermind’ type eugenics program.)
For my part I am not sure how confident I could be of differences between, say, lawyer’s children and engineer’s children, after controlling for intelligence. Probably some but it’d take a whole lot of data to find significance. Journalists? Who knows. They could even be more susceptible to rationality than engineers for all I know. Potentially contrarian truth seeking is not out of place in a journalist.
I’m more comfortable with making estimates based on the groups that imply serious differences in personality. For example, marketers, ‘Desperate Housewives’ type socialites and human resources middle managers, all after controlling for IQ. Certain kinds of biased thinking are a competitive advantage in those environments.
Thanks :)
NOW: Time to dogpile you with definitional quibbles!
Um, ok then.
I agree. Doing the kind of thing that lukeprog is talking about would be more akin creating the environment where stem cells specialize into skin, bone or muscle cells. We would be creating an environment that rewards rationality, which would guide them into morphing into more rational people.
Is speculating on whether a metaphor is suitable an appropriate topic for Less Wrong?
It may be more of an OvercomingBias thing although it certainly crops up here from time to time too. We call it “Reference Class Tennis”. ;)