My personal experience is that I had most of what enables me to be epistemically rational from childhood (so probably genetic), but that the exposure to behavioral economics, science and other rationality-adjacent memes early in my life significantly boosted that genetic seed. Another personal observation: I have never felt someone I know has improved their rationality. Though I also don’t know almost anyone who even cares about becoming more rational.
Rudi C
Karma: 35
[Question] What subfields of mathematics are most useful for what subfields of AI?
I think they do; Consider The League. It’s a somewhat exclusive dating app that does provide advice on your profile. An app that has a more attractive community is itself a more attractive app.
A major missing piece might be that in the ancestral environment, sexuality and the social sphere were quite different from the modern day. Specifically, (the following points are mere speculation on my part.)
Good dating advice was already an established part of the meme pool, while bad dating advice was a memetic weapon of your competitors.
People knew everyone in the tribe rather well, so a lot of optimization/deception was simply not an option.
It was difficult to hide the fact that you are trying to optimize your sexual life. This effort itself probably signaled against you.
Sexuality and normal social relations were much more intertwined, and monogamy not the norm, so you were better off optimizing your social status and popularity as a whole rather than focusing narrowly on attracting specific people with unsustainable signals.
Radical self-improvement was probably not all that possible in the first place. When your genetics and the meme pool have had time to evolve for your environment, you have little to gain from trying to consciously improve, and a lot to lose.
Religion might also have been a factor in this; If the dating advice was influenced by the tribe’s religion, it is probable that it would optimize for things that are irrelevant or counterproductive.
Aside from these, I think you have not produced much evidence that people are bad at dating. Most of the examples you have provided seem to me to be the kind of things that thee public is generally bad at. (Like, the public doesn’t use “evidence-based” books on most any subject.)
[Question] What sources (i.e., blogs) of nonfiction book reviews do you find most useful?
[Question] What video games are more famous in our community than in the general public?
I rate books’ perceived potential from 0 to 10 (I actually just label anything below 7 as bad as I’ll never read those). I use Goodreads/Amazon’s ratings/reviews, the source I used to find the book, its Goodreads summary, and its authors to estimate its relevance to my goals, its quality in achieving its purported aim, and its relative quality in the memesphere it tries to elucidate. I use Goodreads exclusive shelves to label each book’s potential and also shelf it under what it teaches. I then browse my Goodreads’ shelves when I’m out of books. This whole approach doesn’t work very efficiently though, as I have trouble assessing books’ qualities and my own priorities.
[Question] What are your recommendations on books to listen to when doing, e.g., chores?
[Question] Encourage creating repositories on Github instead of Lesswrong
What’s the curl command to access this via the API? The main use I have in mind, though, is just seeing the latest edit date to know how up-to-date the post is (or how well-maintained, in the case of repository-style posts.)
[Question] How to see the last update date of a post?
[Question] What things should everyone websearch?
[Question] What are the studies and literature on the traditional medicine theory of humorism?
I already use Voice Dream, and I love it! But human voice is still better quality.
My HDL is 29, so I’m rather afraid of messing my lipids further.
Rationality might not have a lot of practical value, precisely because things that had such value are already well-engineered by evolution and culture. But it still advances your understanding of the world and yourself a lot, and I personally find that one of my few terminal values. Incidentally, rationality might imply that Starcraft is a kind of trojan that exploits our reward circuits, and if we want to maximize our values (as opposed to our pleasure), we are well-advised to take a stance against this exploitation.