I know what you mean about the author’s views replacing your own! I think it’s good to sit on your thoughts for a few days afterwards and let your excitement simmer down so your rationality can kick in and pull it apart and put it back together again, although I have a feeling that with most posts you’ll still end up conceding that your (new) view is on par with the author’s!
aletheianink
Karma: 60
Thanks! I hope so, in time—I just think it’s wiser to watch and learn so that I can understand how LW works and what specific terms and concepts mean before jumping in with what I think I understand!
The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality
I’m not familiar with the first two, but as I was reading this article I thought of Derren Brown. I think he’s a really interesting person to watch work—it shows you how deft a person can be with your mind if they’re good enough, and how big the gaps in our own second-to-second thought processes can be. I find him not only entertaining but really thought-provoking.
This isn’t absolutely relevant, and may not be helpful, but my mother is the type of person who will talk at length—easily an hour—if you don’t stop. And you can’t just say “Um, I was thinking - ” or “yeah, I agree”, because she’ll just talk over the top of you and not listen. My strategy is to wait for a pause (usually a very short one, because she doesn’t leave long pauses) and then try to quickly cram a sentence in to divert the top. This may work for you, as you’re not technically interrupting—you’re just jumping in quickly with your idea—and you may find this is enough to divert the conversation so that you can more easily put your view across (or be asked more).
He does actually say obstropolous, but he must have read obsteperous somewhere and mispronounced it. Thank you!
I have bookmarked it because I want to read pretty much every link but don’t currently have the time to do so.
Are you saying then, that if we fully understood what other people were saying, there would be less irrationality?
I agree that sometimes using unusual, uncommon or long words when a shorter one will do can be counterproductive, but what about topic-specific vocabulary—words which are common in given circles (for example LW) but have complex ideas or meanings behind them? Or would you consider that to fall under your latter sentence?
I see what you mean; that makes sense. I think that’s something LW has certainly pointed out for me—by knowing one’s own boundaries of understanding, one can try to further one’s knowledge of the unknown.
I’m about to put child to bed so I haven’t time to read the link right now, but I’ll certainly be on it first thing in the morning!
I had a complicated point to make about the interplay of vocabulary and simplifying ideas in order to make thinking more clear (and thus perhaps rationality?) but I think I kind of lost that in the post and have made it sound more like “can people think if they don’t have words?”.
I agree with what you’ve written, and I’d say that your last sentence rather answers my (intended) question: correlation may exist, but causation is a lot trickier to pin.
As I said above, I think I kind of misphrased my question while trying to make it clear in my head—almost ironically, my inability to find the right words hampered my ability to communicate what I meant.
I agree completely about people making up words for new ideas—I suppose that’s what I meant to bypass: we make up words as shorthand for longer concepts, because if we didn’t, it would take a lot longer to say or explain what we meant. My question was meant to be along the lines of, if we didn’t have those new words, would our rationality be hampered by the lack of specific words (even if we knew what we meant in our minds)? (You don’t have to answer that, I was just trying to clarify!)
Thank you—I think the article was actually rather weak, on review, but thank you!
I’m going to read the article now.
Your initial point was what prompted my thoughts on the issue—essentially, as I read through LW, learn new words, new ways of thinking, new approaches, will I become more rational? I suppose that’s not solely vocabulary—it includes the ideas that spawned that vocabulary—but looking up definitions has something I’ve definitely been spending a lot of time doing!
I have no idea why I put that. I was trying to just be very specific, so people wouldn’t ask “well, what if they hadn’t heard of x” or whatever … it may be because I’m used to reading about the entitlement of average, white, English-speaking people (specifically men), and just linked that in without thinking. It’s irrelevant, so I’ll go fix it—thanks.
Minor nitpick: I find it rather silly when people say “a full x percent” (as in, a full 89%) of something—either you’re being correct and specific, and you mean 89% exactly, or you’re being fairly specific and mean 89.124535% or something. You wouldn’t use it to mean “around 89%” or “just under but close to 89%”—you’d round down to 88% or, again, be specific.
This was an excellent article, though—something I have thought about fleetingly before but never really considered. My personal area of interest is animal rights, which is a lot harder to evaluate (also, I’m not in America, so GIveWell probably hasn’t evaluated any charities which I would donate to) - however, it’s given me a lot to think about, and a new way to approach charity.
Your post was over a year ago, but I will reply anyway:
I don’t know the answer to the first question, as I am also new.
To the second question, I recommend something like readability where you can clip a page (or sequence) and then read that in a really nice interface through the readability app.
Thank you for the link—this was essentially what I was looking for! I have yet to read the article, but it’s an interesting conclusion—perhaps other commenters were simply going by their intuition or what they felt, instead of looking for evidence?
I find it disappointing that there aren’t any more recent comments than halfway through this year—I’ll scan the comments to see if the discussion was ported elsewhere, but usually that’s flagged in the post so I doubt it …
I don’t know XFrequentists’s reasons, but in addition to this I think golfing as a social skill tends to apply more to old money/old institutions (and particularly in America). I don’t have evidence for this, but that’s pretty much the only setting I’ve seen it in. My husband went golfing with work a few years back (he’s an system administrator) and he and the guys he went with all got drunk and played pool with the golf clubs/balls—even where it was set up as a work gathering, it wasn’t taken seriously.
However, given your question—if it there was good evidence to support it’s prospects in one’s career—I think it would come down to whether personal dislike of golfing (for example, something I feel) overcame the benefits of golfing in that particular situation and the desire to dramatically improve one’s job prospects. I suppose that’s rather obvious, though?
Anti-habit: for quitting something, I’ve found that telling myself “wait 5 more minutes” each time I think about it can help reduce and break the habit. If your habit is linked to something else (for example, you always have a cigarette when you have a cup of coffee), this is extra useful. This helps me with not eating junk foods and overcoming a craving—often I forget about it.
Before I started a family, I went through a period of minimalism, and I had a “magic” wallet (card-sized, flips money across on the inside using elasticised bands, doesn’t fit coins), and only carried that, my phone and keys. I couldn’t collect receipts, lots of store cards, coins, tags or whatever else in it, and it had what I needed (back then).
(separate comments for separate habits, as per the original post)
I’m Katy, I’m 26, I have a 7 month old baby (I feel that’s important because it heavily affects my current ability to think/sleep/eat/do anything) and a husband and … well, I never really thought about rationality until I came across Less Wrong.
I grew up always … wanting more. I believed in god, for a while, until I realised I was just talking to myself. I suffered from bipolar disorder (mainly depressive) from my early teens until … well, until I became pregnant, actually, when it mysteriously disappeared. I wanted to meet people who understood, who thought deeper, who questioned, who wondered. I came across Terry Pratchett, and I found his ideas within stories to be so wonderful, but met few people who had read (or enjoyed) his writing, and even fewer who ever found the concepts of “how” and “why” as intensely interesting as I did.
I studied a lot of different things at university—English, history, Antarctic Studies (I live in Australia so there was a course down in Tasmania), maths, physics, business … but most of my learning has been alone, through books or the internet or waking up at 2am and thinking “I wonder why that happens” and then going on an hours-long adventure through the internet.
When I got married, I got two lovely step-daughters in the package, aged 6 and 10, and introducing them to science and maths has really reignited my interest in learning again. Unfortunately this is slightly challenge by their mother who is a bit of an unpleasant dullard (when the girls learnt the entire periodic table from a song I showed them on youtube, her response was “science is boring” ). My husband and I also hope to home-school our daughter, and I want to be able to give her as much support as possible in whatever areas interest her, and ignite the love of knowledge that her father and I have.
I came across LW a few days ago and just instantly got drawn in—the form of the posts, the replies, the flow of logic and reason … it’s not only very educational, but inspires me to do better in my daily life. Sure, you don’t have to be particularly rational to change a nappy or feed a baby, but (for example) I was considering getting contents insurance and, after reading a thread here I thought “maybe I should approach this rationally, instead of just thinking that it seems like a good idea”, and went on to do some rough calculations and probabilities and approach it that way.
I don’t think I’ll be posting on any other threads any time soon—I’d rather read and learn and learn and get a feel for the community rather than post a half-decent comment that doesn’t contribute much—but I figured it would be worth posting here to start with.