In swimming, you can point to Michael Phelps and say “try to imitate him as closely as possible”. There is a “right” way to swim.
However, rationality isn’t this way. There is no zero-sum rationality game. It is constantly improving. And the only way it can improve is by self-experimentation in rationality. Ultimately, I think that Schopenhauer said it best:
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
Ultimately, if the field of rationality is to advance, then people must be doing self-experimentation (introspection) to advance it.
I do think that you can learn from other people who are “further along the path” than you. For example: I’ve learned on my own that when I’m depressed, I think the same irrational thoughts. However, it wasn’t until I memorized the appropriate responses (as opposed to synthesizing them again each time the thought came up) that my irrational thought patterns were immediately recognized as irrational. I could have learned this from somebody else, but considering how much self-help is tailored to a non-rational audience, I think it’s just better to develop your own methods. However, I think the rationality boot camps sound interesting (as the advice is tailored to people like us).
In swimming, you can point to Michael Phelps and say “try to imitate him as closely as possible”. There is a “right” way to swim. However, rationality isn’t this way. There is no zero-sum rationality game. It is constantly improving. And the only way it can improve is by self-experimentation in rationality. Ultimately, I think that Schopenhauer said it best:
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
Ultimately, if the field of rationality is to advance, then people must be doing self-experimentation (introspection) to advance it.
I do think that you can learn from other people who are “further along the path” than you. For example: I’ve learned on my own that when I’m depressed, I think the same irrational thoughts. However, it wasn’t until I memorized the appropriate responses (as opposed to synthesizing them again each time the thought came up) that my irrational thought patterns were immediately recognized as irrational. I could have learned this from somebody else, but considering how much self-help is tailored to a non-rational audience, I think it’s just better to develop your own methods. However, I think the rationality boot camps sound interesting (as the advice is tailored to people like us).