A joking objection: somebody that refuses to join due to sans serif would be harmful to the cause if they join anyway.
A serious objection: it feels wrong and dangerous to join a group that you don’t support 100% at the time of joining. This feeling is adaptively correct because group efforts often drift or get hijacked, and a group that’s a little out of tune with you is more likely to drift away over time. Especially if the group is new.
We already have drugs of various kinds. I think a determined person today could create a “God drug” that mirrors the experiences Crowley describes. Today’s technology would suffice but you’d need lower ethical standards for experimentation.
Um… Eliezer? I just joined (you know me as Vladimir Slepnev from OB) and already have a suggestion. Wouldn’t it be better to remove “Top contributors” from the right section? It’s nastily perverting my incentives, can’t speak about the others, but sure I’m not alone. Of course this isn’t a blackmail attempt :-)
Worse. How many rationalists can honestly say, “my own life is as bright and happy as I could make it”? Why go for holy causes when you can’t fix your own life—maybe it’s a compensation mechanism, as Eric Hoffer suggested? Honestly the seduction community comes out looking better in this respect.
A great description, funny how it applies to other emotional acts such as cheating on your spouse (increase reproductive chances while risking comfort of family life). It might be enlightening to think of some emotions as optimizations for the very long term—for you and all your descendants (makes sense as emotions were created by evolution) - and the rational mind as optimizing for the short to medium term..
Yvain, what’s the website? I’m not skilled enough to find it from those clues. Asking because I outlined the exact same idea in a blog post in Russian about a year ago, thinking it was original, and now am curious to see the implementation.
It’s pointless to be a lone rationalist
Surely you mean “a lone altruist”. A lone rationalist can be very successful. Sorry about the nitpick, but Eliezer has recently been trying to conflate the two words for whatever aims.
You’ve nailed exactly what worries me in your comment and the original post. You see, belief systems that aim for self-propagation are prone to turn really icky over time. A scientist doesn’t want above all else to spread the scientific worldview, a painter doesn’t set out to make everyone else paint, even a pickup artist has no desire to make all males alphas—they all have other, concrete goals; but religious or political views have to be viral. There’s any number of movements whose adherents have a priority of spreading the word, and right now I can’t think of a single such movement I’d want to be associated with.
Thomas Ligotti’s short horror story “The Shadow, The Darkness” describes a man becoming a p-zombie due to extreme pain caused by a stomach malady. He describes the transformation as losing his “fabricated personality” to become a “successful organism”, and actually finds international success as a sculptor afterwards.
I believe the traditional mystical term for this experience is “ego death”. Many seek it.
In the old days science was done by independently wealthy people, and how successful it was. Can today’s scientists create profitable enterprises to fund their work? FHI is supposedly full of good programmers. Say, everyone works on a joint project half a week and does science the other half. Sounds like a real world application for the community’s rationality and cooperation abilities, what do you say Eliezer?
While old science seems to have had greater total, bulk impact on the world than new science, I have polemically overblown the independence factor. “Gentleman scientists” were few, most scholars had patrons of some kind.
It was more of an invitation to consider non-donation-based funding models. We have evidence that part-time scientists can do great work. Wouldn’t it be better if researchers spent their non-scientific hours together producing short-range value rather than fight each other over grants and tenure?
That’s because within our field, any false beliefs and sloppy thinking eventually surface in the form of bugs...
Flattering theory, but it doesn’t explain the abundance of programmers on Reddit where no one tries to overcome bias. I have a simpler theory: we programmers have a habit of surfing the internet looking for intellectual junk food.
My examples indicate it’s not necessary to hand victory to others. Science didn’t spread due to evangelism, science spread because it works. Art spreads because people love it. This is the standard we should be holding ourselves to.
Evangelism is the equivalent of proactive sales with an inferior product. A good evangelist/salesman can push through negative-sum deals, actually destroying total value in the world. If you’ve spent time in the IT industry, you recognize this picture.
Eliezer said repeatedly that rationalists should WIN. Great, now won’t anyone take this phrase seriously? I don’t want a rationalist technique to make myself pure from racism or somesuch crap. I want a rationalist technique to WIN. Fo’ real. Develop it, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Right now you (we) have no product, and preaching is no substitute.
Thanks for the encouragement! I wrote it up, should show under Recent Posts.
Truth isn’t something you feel is true.
Programming abounds with theories that give their adherents a sense of clarity—for example the relational model of data, or object-oriented design, or REST. Funny that all those theories have active “evangelists”. My experience with them all had a pattern of initial “wow” followed much later by a painful un-clarification, as contact with the real world brought out the theory’s shortcomings. Curiously, my experience with Overcoming Bias has followed the same pattern: I bought into the ideas wholesale for the first months, then slowly grew disillusioned over about a year. Today it’s all the same old same old. The idea of correcting cognitive biases just isn’t as powerful by itself as we like to think. Hence my post.
Don’t get stuck in the box an ideology outlines for you. It may be a good fit today but you’ll hopefully grow.
Re PS: if rationality had no other real-world uses except business success, and in that single area hairstyle proved to be a greater contributor, then yes, I’d leave and never look back.
I feel the reasons you cite are all weaker than the real reason: we give work instead of money because we want to know the cause is sincere. Analogously, it’s better to give a hobo bread than money, because he’d just buy booze.
Also, moralizing with an ulterior motive is bad in my metric. Didn’t think I would ever downvote you, but here goes.
Funny. For the last several months I’ve been doing exactly what you enumerated: physical training, voice lessons and improving my fashion sense. Those were all rational decisions (caused in small part by Overcoming Bias) and they did already help me.
(more stupidity scratched)
You’re right. Sorry.
Emotions can also have a lower time preference than your conscious self. For example, a surge of anger can make you stand up against a bully and win much more than the present confrontation in long term self-respect and respect of others, even if you eventually “lose” this particular conflict. My subconscious is always tracking the intangible “social” terms of my long range utility function, and over the years I’ve come to appreciate that.