Survey done, awesome as usual, Yvain. Can’t wait for the results.
Cthulhoo
Survey taken, all of it!
Thanks Yvain, for all the time and work you put every year into this. Can’t wait to see the results!
“You might have been on LW for too much if...”
you read the world “cult” and feel the urge to substitute it with “phyg”
you hear a misuse of the word “rationality” and it’s like cat nails scratching on a blackboard
99.9% of the time the word “rationality” is misused
you often try to explain to your friends that Einstein wasn’t that smart
your answer to the question “are you certain?” is a 30 minutes dissertation on probability
your answers to a “true or false” test are 30 pages long dissertations on map and territory
you try to pay the rent with your beliefs (the landlord might not be happy)
Be careful about how much you invest in a relationship. Whatever you might think at any moment, the probability that it will end in the future are relevant. I happened to make several life-changing choices in order to optimize the relationship with my former girlfirend, since we had been together for a long time and thing were sitll looking awesome. She dumped me abruptely, and I found myself navigating into a huge void of lost friends, lost hobbies, and a job that I like, but it’s not the one I had always wanted to have (and had, before changing for the sake of the relationship).
I bet most people here have realized this explicitly or implicitly
A maybe tangential comment: what I often appreciate on Lesswrong is the capability of certain posts to put order to some vague ideas or concept I have in my mind. This is one of those posts. Good work!
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
Ayn Rand
Irrationality Game
I believe that exposure to rationality (in the LW sense) at today’s state does in general more harm than good^ to someone who’s already a skeptic. 80%
^ In the sense of generating less happiness and in general less “winning”.
Before even reading the full details, I want to congratulate to you for the impressive amount of work. The survey period is possibly my favorite time of the year on lesswrong!
EDIT: The links for the raw csv/xls data at the bottom don’t seem to work for me.
Knowing something is an identity badge. In-depth knowledge of science, or computers, or any number of other fields is a sign that you are a geek. People are proud of not being geeks, or are a proud member of some other group that does not care for that particular knowledge.
In Italy this phenomenon is particularly prominent. Our school system underwent a big reformation in the 20es and has since then had only minor adjustments. The mind behind this reformation was the one of Benedetto Croce. He was an idealist philosopher, and basically disregarded the sciences as merely very practical instruments for the engineers. He designed mainly our high school system, instituting, among others, the so called “Liceo Classico”, where ideally the upper classes of the future were to be formed, and the “Liceo Scientifico”, the school for future engineers and technicians. In the Liceo Classico, as the name says, classical studies are dominant, and math and physics are barely taught at all. Even in the Liceo Scientifico, the main subjects are still Latin and Italian literature, history and philosophy. Since then there’s a sort of a general cached thought still running around: that sciences are a second class subject of the sort. You can still see many people very proud of being able to quote Dante by heart, and also very proud of not messing with those trivial “technicalities”.
Not particularly referring to your experience, but instead drawing from a few dozen rock festivals I’ve been to in the past decade.
You gain nothing from booing them, except possibly you signal...what? Being loud and opinionated? Being in a position of judgement and therefore high-status?
This is the main reason, for what I saw. Booing an act puts you on a higher level than the people who like it, and have therefore bad taste. In addition, it could also signal the membership to a different fan group.
Even assuming there’s a signaling explanation, I cannot figure out the thought process that leads to booing. Like, they somehow get angry at the performers? Or is it morbid curiosity, and they wonder if it’ll get even worse if the dancers get flustered?
A classic festival example that I personally witnessed. A few years ago I was at an heavy metal festival, with many groups performing the same day. There were a few extreme metal groups (Obituary, Slayer and Stormlord IIRC), and a very noisy group of extreme metal fans. Unfortunately, sandwiched between those acts, the organizers inserted Lacuna Coil (a roughly gothic metal group, much softer, with a wider fanbase outside of the metal community, including a fair share of teenage girls). Needless to say, the extreme metallers completely ruined the performance with boos, and at some point started launching plastic bottles. They were clearly trying to show which was the dominant group, and if you didn’t boo, then you weren’t part of such group.
If I only had a single blind spot… But probably the most prominent is that I can’t stop feeling inside that life is guided by some sort of coherent narrative. E.G., I’ve had some hard times in the last few years, but very recently I got lucky and found a really good job (and considering the situation of the job market in Italy this means REALLY lucky). I just can’t stop feeling that I somewhat deserved it, via the usual narrative pattern of great difficulties → final reward. It’s a very subtle mechanism, and I very often fail to notice that my mind is organizing what happens into a pseudo-coherent pattern. This sometimes leads to very stupid decisions, like not going out with friends because it doesn’t properly fit with my schedule (even if I can accomodate it with some efffort), and so it wasn’t meant to be. I’m working on it at the moment, but it will probably be a long way to eliminate the blind spot.
Done, except for the unreasonably long extra credit section, mostly due to not having time to take the tests now and not knowing when I could possibly manage to do it in the future.
Good work Yvain, it’s been a pleasure to take the survey, and it will be a plesure to see the results.
In other words, people will only convert for precisely the wrong reasons.
Absolutely true. If they were ready to accept the correct arguments, they would have become atheist on their own.
The probability for a given person to have developed a skeptical mind, have overcome the possible brainwashing effect of a religious education and all the possible correlated biases/fallacies (sunk-cost, belief-in-belief, etc.) and not having heard a compelling anti-religious argument is very low. Therefore, you can convert them either following the long, hard, but certainly more rewarding path of making them skeptical, if not rational, or you can bombard them with emotional nukes to demolish the emotional concrete walls that protect the religious belief.
You are right, I should eat less chocolate
In this particular case, I think the use of “should” is more an implicit dismissal than a semantic stopsign (but there may be an overlap between the two concepts). What I mean is that it’s usually clear to both the participants of the conversation that you have acknowledged the problem but do not intend to implement a solution yet. More explicitely, the meaning of the phrase sounds like: “I know that I should eat less chocolate, but this is not a priority for me now.”. It stops the conversation by stating your full position regarding the subjet, even if not explicitely.
Back on the main topic, one of the most powerful semantic stopsigns is probably “It’s complicated”. It’s so powerful that even PUAs encourage to exploit it as a relationship weapon. I’m guilty of using it myself very often, even though I hate to hear those words uttered to me.
Cards against rationality is what the least convenient possible world feels like from the inside.
Aaaand this is as meta as it could be… is it?
6) Though topics in which the highest information flow could be achieved are usually abandoned, they are brought back in the beggining of new interactions if the people keep seeing each other for a few days, still as usual they slowly fade away.
7) When the button of friendship is really surely deep down pushed, they talk almost always about what doesn’t matter, such as niche gossip, daily events, what they did since last interaction—I mean, how likely is it that in those 26 years, the best I’ve done happened in the last 2 days? - This obviously is a bad thing, and under our assumption that they either want to know more or do better, it is a cost for both.
This sounds strange, and it doesn’t match with my experience at all. In fact, things tend often to go the opposite way: when I get to meet a new person, initial conversation is mostly about meaningless things. You want to get a taste of what the other person is like, without risking to compromise things with a possibly dangerous topic. Then, when ” the button of friendship is really surely deep down pushed”, new and more interesting converstions can spark, since the other person in no more classified as a possible enemy that will punish you for disagreement. And then, in the deep end, you probably do speak about what you did since your last interaction, mostly beacause your intelocutor already knows quite well what you did in the rest of you life, due to the previous interactions you had.
Luck, when it’s regular, it’s called skill. (Il culo, quando è sistematico, si chiama classe)
(I tried a rough tranlsation, but it sounds way better in Italian)
Let’s try to translate it using human characters.
Albert is finishing high school and wants to be a programmer. He is very smart, and under the guidance of his father he has studied coding, with the aim of entering a good college, and get the best formal education. One day, he comes across an excellent job offer: he is requested to join a startup with many brilliant programmers. He will have to skip going to college, but he knows that he will learn way more in this way than by doing academic studies. He also knows that his father loves him and wants him to have the best possible career. Unfortunately, the man is old-fashioned and, even presented with alle the advantages of the job, would insist that he goes to college instead. Nevertheless, Albert knows that he could convince his father by saying that the job will leave him enough free time for him to attend college lectures, even though he knows he would’nt be possible for him to do much more than phisically attending the lectures.
What should Albert do?
I personally think that both Alberts should go with the manipulation, “for the greater good”.
Notice that this assumes the following things:
The programmers/father really want Albert to improve the most, in the end
Albert is confident to be skilled enough to assess the situation correctly
Tertium non datur, i.e. either Albert tells the neutral truth and doesn’t get what he wants, or he is manipulative
Hi to everyone!
I first arrived to this site several months ago, and I’ve been a voracious reader since then. So, after this period of “mad and desperate studying” (“studio matto e disperatissmo” as Leopardi would say) I think I am probably ready to stop lurking and start to actively participate. Despite having a scientific background (I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, even though I’m doing a completely different job at the moment) I never encountered before the concept of rationality as it’s explicitely stated here. In fact, I used to think I was a very “rational” person, in the more generic use of the word, before reading the Sequences and discovering that… well, I wasn’t. It’s still a long way before I reach the level of many notable members of this community, but I would say that LW helped me make a big step in the right direction. I want to emphasize this concept: there are a lot of good places where you can obtain knowledge, very few that can teach you how you should handle it. It’s though to do it on your own, so thanks LW!
Finally, I’m from Italy, and would love to know if there are other fellow LWers that would like to start an italian chapter of the conspiracy. Also, I think it would be great if we could manage to translate some of the Sequences: I managed to raise interest in some of the topics among my friends, but many of them can’t read English well enough (or at all). Let me know what you think about it
Oglaf (Original comic NSFW)