To enrich these great points about how to get more epistemic rationality, I would suggest intentionally associating positive emotions with epistemic rationality practices.
Gleb_Tsipursky
Karma: 1,559
Meetup : Columbus Rationality
While I agree that Less Wrong is a great venue for learning about rationality, I think we can improve the newbie experience here for those who are coming from the perspective of reading the gathered thoughts of the Very Special Person to the community blog setting of many people writing together. I am in particular concerned by this question as I am starting up a nonprofit devoted to spreading rationality among the broad masses, and hope to channel advanced students to Less Wrong. Do you have any thoughts on how to smooth the transition for newcomers?
The most important thing I learned was the high value of the outside perspective. It is something that I strive to deploy deliberately through getting into intentional friendships with other aspiring rationalists at Intentional Insights. We support each other’s ability to achieve goals in life through what we came to call a goal buddy system, providing an intentional outside perspective on each other’s thinking about life projects and priorities.
The most important thing I learned was the high value of the outside perspective. It is something that I strive to deploy deliberately through getting into intentional friendships with other aspiring rationalists at Intentional Insights. We support each other’s ability to achieve goals in life through what we came to call a goal buddy system, providing an intentional outside perspective on each other’s thinking about life projects and priorities.
I often promote Intentional Insights by talking about updating beliefs. I highlight the value of overcoming the negative emotions associated with learning about making a mistake, and instead encourage associating positive emotions with acknowledging reality and wanting to know the truth. This lets people take the best thing that they can from the mistake and move forward to achieve more!
The most frequently useful is map and territory. It is something that I deploy on a daily level to remind myself of the value of never believing that I know everything, and to leave myself open constantly to the possibility of making mistakes and updating my beliefs. It is also one of the most basic things I teach at Intentional Insights.
Excellent clarion call to raise our expectation of what agency is and can do in our lives, as well as to have sensible expectations of our and others’ humble default states. Well done.
I would caution that the term “roles” should perhaps be modified if the intended connotation is positive to “adaptive roles” or “considered roles” to help avoid confusion with the idea that seems prevalent in the LW community, for good reason, that roles are generally not at all well calibrated to maximize utility
Wonderful article. This idea of a “mental chorus” comprised of some combination of descriptive historical components of the self as well as aspirational components seems very rich for examination and experiment. I wonder how thinking in this way can most effectively be combined with mindfulness practice to optimize self-interactions.
Hi all, I’m a social entrepreneur, professor, and aspiring rationalist. My project is Intentional Insights. This is a new nonprofit I co-founded with my wife and other fellow aspiring rationalists in the Columbus, OH Less Wrong meetup. The nonprofit emerged from our passion to promote rationality among the broad masses. We use social influence techniques, create stories, and speak to emotions. We orient toward creating engaging videos, blogs, social media, and other content that an aspiring rationalist like yourself can share with friends and family members who would not be open to rationality proper due to the Straw Vulcan misconception. I would appreciate any advice and help from fellow aspiring rationalists. The project is described more fully below, but for those for whom that’s tl;dr, there is a request for advice and allies at the bottom.
Since I started participating in the Less Wrong meetup in Columbus, OH and reading Less Wrong, what seems like ages ago, I can hardly remember my past thinking patterns. Because of how much awesomeness it brought to my life, I have become one of the lead organizers of the meetup. Moreover, I find it really beneficial to bring rationality into my research and teaching as a tenure-track professor at Ohio State, where I am a member of the Behavioral Decision-Making Initiative. Thus, my scholarship brings rationality into historical contexts, for example in my academic articles on agency, emotions, and social influence. In my classes I have students engage with the Checklist of Rationality Habits and other readings that help advance rational thinking.
As do many aspiring rationalists, I think rationality can bring such benefits to the lives of many others, and also help improve our society as a whole by leveling up rational thinking, secularizing society, and thus raising the sanity waterline. For that, our experience in the Columbus Less Wrong group has shown that we need to get people interested in rationality by showing them its benefits and how it can solve their problems, while delivering complex ideas in an engaging and friendly fashion targeted at a broad public, and using active learning strategies and connecting rationality to what they already know. This is what I do in my teaching, and is the current best practice in educational psychology. It has worked great with my students when I began to teach them rationality concepts. Yet I do not know of any current rationality trainings that do this. Currently, such education in rationality is available mainly through excellent, intense 4-day workshops the Center for Applied Rationality, usually held in the San Francisco area. There are also some online classes on decision-making. However, I really wanted to see something oriented at the broad public, which can gain a great deal from a much lower level of education in rationality made accessible and relevant to their everyday lives and concerns, and delivered in a fashion perceived as interesting, fun, and friendly by mass audiences, as we aim to do with our events.
Intentional Insights came from this desire. This nonprofit explicitly orients toward getting the broad masses interested in and learning about rationality by providing fun and engaging content delivered in a friendly manner. What we want to do is use various social influence methods and promote rationality as a self-improvement/leadership development offering for people who are not currently interested in rational thinking because of the Straw Vulcan image, but who are interested in self-improvement, professional development, and organizational development. As people become more advanced, we will orient them toward more advanced rationality, at Less Wrong and elsewhere. Now, there are those who believe rationality should be taught only to those who are willing to put in the hard work and effort to overcome the high barrier to entry of learning all the jargon. However, we are reformers, not revolutionaries, and believe that some progress is better than no progress. And the more aspiring rationalists engage in various projects aimed to raise the sanity waterline, using different channels and strategies, the better. We can all help and learn from each other, adopting an experimental attitude and gathering data about what methods work best, constantly updating our beliefs and improving our abilities to help more people gain greater agency.
The channels of delivery locally are classes and workshops. Here is what one college student participant wrote after a session: “I have gained a new perspective after attending the workshop. In order to be more analytical, I have to take into account that attentional bias is everywhere. I can now further analyze and make conclusions based on evidence.” This and similar statements seem to indicate some positive impact, and we plan to gather evidence to examine whether workshop participants adopt more rational ways of thinking and how the classes influence people’s actual performance over time.
We have a website that takes this content globally, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The website currently has:
Blog posts, such as on agency; polyamory and cached thinking; and life meaning and purpose. We aim to make them easy-to-read and engaging to get people interested in rational thinking. These will be targeted at a high school reading level, the type of fun posts aspiring rationalists can share with their friends or family members whom they may want to get into rationality, or at least explain what rationality is all about.
Videos with similar content to blog posts, such as on evaluating reality clearly, and on meaning and purpose
A resources page, with links to prominent rationality venues, such as Less Wrong, CFAR, HPMOR, etc.
It will eventually have:
Rationality-themed merchandise, including stickers, buttons, pens, mugs, t-shirts, etc.
Online classes teaching rationality concepts
A wide variety of other products and offerings, such as e-books and apps
Now, why my wife and I, and the Columbus Less Wrong group? To this project, I bring my knowledge of educational psychology, research expertise, and teaching experience; my wife her expertise as a nonprofit professional with an MBA in nonprofit management; and other Board members include a cognitive neuroscientist, a licensed therapist, and other awesome members of the Columbus, OH, Less Wrong group.
Now, I can really use the help of wise aspiring rationalists to help out this project:
1) If you were trying to get the Less Wrong community engaged in the project, what would you do? 2) If you were trying to promote this project broadly, what would you do? What dark arts might you use, and how? 3) If you were trying to get specific groups and communities interested in promoting rational thinking in our society engaged in the project, what would you do? 4) If you were trying to fundraise for this project, what would you do? 5) If you were trying to persuade people to sign up for workshops or check out a website devoted to rational thinking, what would you do? How would you tie it to people’s self-interest and everyday problems that rationality might solve? What dark arts might you use, and how? 6) If you were trying to organize a nonprofit devoted to doing all the stuff above, what would you do to help manage its planning and organization? What about managing relationships and group dynamics?
Besides the advice, I invite you to ally with us and collaborate on this project in whatever way is optimal for you. Money is very helpful right now as we are fundraising to pay for costs associated with starting up the nonprofit, around $3600 through the rest of 2014, and you can donate directly through our website. Your time, intellectual capacity, and any specific talents would also be great, on things such as giving advice and helping out on specific tasks/projects, developing content in the form of blogs, videos, etc., promoting the project to those you know, and other ways to help out.
Leave your thoughts in comments below, or you can get in touch with me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org. I hope you would like to ally with us to raise the sanity waterline!
Intentionally Raising the Sanity Waterline
Hm, I actually met several people who argued that those not dedicated to learning the LW jargon don’t deserve the benefits. I guess we meet different people.
The rationality merchandise is not aimed at the broad audience primarily, but for donors who would like to support our work.
Regarding your comment about the video, I notice I’m confused, did you mean to say this video on evaluating reality clearly that I cited in the post as part of our offerings is meant to teach people buzzwords and spread stupid ideas? Can you clarify where in the video you noticed those? We’d be glad to optimize our offerings based on feedback.
About the article on polyamory: the goal of that article is not to advocate polyamory, but to encourage people to consider it as an acceptable relationship style—the salient phrase in the article is “encourage an openness toward poly relationships as one among many relationship styles.” At Intentional Insights we aim to contribute to de-stigmatizing polyamory and promoting thinking about relationships rationally in general.
I agree that asking for dark arts is a strategic choice. In this case, I think the ends do justify the means. It’s a balance we all draw differently, and I accept that you may draw it differently than we do.
About the article on polyamory: the goal of that article is to contribute to de-stigmatizing polyamory and promoting thinking about relationships rationally in general. We accept that it might turn off some people.
Sorry to hear that you perceive a tone of talking down to the audience. As you can see in our mission statement, we aim to “we empower individuals and organizations to refine and reach their goals by transforming recent research on rational thinking and emotional intelligence into practical and easy-to-use strategies and tools conveyed in a friendly and engaging manner.” Can you clarify where you perceive the tone of talking down? We’d certainly like to avoid conveying that tone on our website. On Less Wrong, we are not dealing with our target audience, though—we are dealing with peer aspiring rationalists, who we hope can help collaborate together with us to spread rational thinking.
To be clear, I certainly think we are also learning—we convey these strategies and tools to ourselves in a friendly and engaging manner and strive to optimize ourselves just as much as we convey them to external audiences. However, I see where there can be a misunderstanding of the mission statement, and we will take that into consideration at our next revision meeting. Appreciate you pointing out the negative interpretation of “dumbing down” that can one can read into that statement. What would be any suggestions on improving the mission statement, from you or anyone else?
Regarding CFAR and its vision statement: I think it’s best to compare vision statement to vision statement. Our vision statement is “We envision a world where individuals, organizations, and governments rely on research-based strategies, constantly improving their ability to evaluate reality clearly and make effective decisions, enabling all of us to live optimally happy, healthy, fulfilling and flourishing lives.” Do you think this can be misread in a problematic manner? Or even better, do you or anyone else have any suggestions on improving the vision statement?
Thanks for engaging so thoroughly, really appreciate the advice :-)
You make a fair comment about the article on polyamory potentially turning off some conservative readers. We will post other articles in the future, of course :-) However, one of our orientations is to help advance the goal of de-stigmatizing polyamory, even though doing so might turn off some conservative readers.
I’m curious on your take about the article not promoting rational thinking about relationships. There is plenty of research cited there about the nature of relationships, poly and non-poly ones alike, and I hope that getting our readers engaged with research on relationships would help promote more rational thinking. What do you think?
I notice I’m confused.
In the Intentional Insights article about polyamory, the word “research” links to the following article in Psychology Today that cites a wide variety of research papers. The word “happy” also links to a similar article
We think it’s quite appropriate to direct readers to an article that cites many research-based papers, as opposed to citing the papers themselves—it’s a pretty efficient goal factoring approach.
Moreover, the large majority of our target audience for the blog posts—people who are early onward in the process of gaining more rational thinking—would be unlikely to read research studies in-depth, and would be much more likely to read articles informed by research studies. So please keep that in mind as you read the Intentional Insights website. Our goal is to raise the sanity waterline by translating complex content for broad audiences.
That’s a great point :-) As you can see from the diverse posts on the website, we are writing about a wide variety of topics. A rational perspective on relationships is one of several topics.
But your comments are duly noted, and we will be working on another post soon. Thanks for helping incrementally update my beliefs
To be clear, our mission is to have more people think rationally about relationships, and we perceive de-stigmatizing polyamory as one subcomponent of that mission.
But your comments are duly noted, and we will be working on another post soon. Thanks for helping incrementally update my beliefs
Glad to do the survey, and appreciate that LW takes the views of readers seriously, that’s great!