Humans are only in a small part pliable reasoning. Most of what makes us us is genetic, subconscious and not available to introspection. We have more blind spots than we have sighted, and we actively resist correcting those blind spots. LW-style rationality tends to appeal to the people who on average are at or below mean in interpersonal skills, so you start with a huge handicap and learning about biases and how to deal with them only gives you some marginal advantage over those like you, not a magic bullet to achieve your goals. Speaking of the goals, humans are confused about what goals they have, what values they have, and a person is better represented not as a single optimizer, but as a multitude of competing agents, some of which are not aware of the others’ presence, and some never bubble up to the conscious awareness at all. Those lucky few of us who have one or two rationality-shaped blind spots benefit the most, the rest, well, here we are discussing why we are not winning instead of actually winning.
Humans are only in a small part pliable reasoning. Most of what makes us us is genetic, subconscious and not available to introspection. We have more blind spots than we have sighted, and we actively resist correcting those blind spots. LW-style rationality tends to appeal to the people who on average are at or below mean in interpersonal skills, so you start with a huge handicap and learning about biases and how to deal with them only gives you some marginal advantage over those like you, not a magic bullet to achieve your goals. Speaking of the goals, humans are confused about what goals they have, what values they have, and a person is better represented not as a single optimizer, but as a multitude of competing agents, some of which are not aware of the others’ presence, and some never bubble up to the conscious awareness at all. Those lucky few of us who have one or two rationality-shaped blind spots benefit the most, the rest, well, here we are discussing why we are not winning instead of actually winning.