I just finished playing a side-scrolling game called Closure (http://www.closuregame.com) that has some qualities of Myst, et al. I think that you’ve got a good idea here, but a problem could arise from the ‘death penalty’ that most games impose. Typically, you just restart the ‘mission.’ Games that operate like that don’t provide quite enough incentive to pull out your whole intellect. If the player knew ahead of time that a single failure meant permanent loss, they would be more apt to give the game effort enough to have their rationality tested accurately.
rysade
I had a similar idea, but I’m still not sure about it. Succeeding in Real Life does seem like a good measure, to a point. How could one gauge one’s success in real life, though? Through yearly income, or net worth? What about happiness or satisfaction?
A fairly simple windows application could nearly eliminate the problem of research during the test—if it were timed. Each round being timed would allow little time to bypass the lockdowns that can be imposed through a windows API. Each time the test is given, a new version of the test software would be released Even the fastest hacker would be locked into taking the test!
I hold the opinion that one should be curious about everything but some things only superficially. If you dig deep into something, it changes the experience of it. There’s something to be said about being intimately familiar with a subject.
Forcing yourself to be curious about every single thing that crosses your path is a good way to make yourself uncomfortable. I consider discomfort of that kind to be good practice when it comes to confronting the possibility I may be wrong about something.
I guess I have trouble living up to that ideal, but at the same time I have learned to be uncomfortable with being too comfortable. I worry that too much anti-curiosity would lead to too much comfort.
I agree. Doing the kind of thing that lukeprog is talking about would be more akin creating the environment where stem cells specialize into skin, bone or muscle cells. We would be creating an environment that rewards rationality, which would guide them into morphing into more rational people.
Is speculating on whether a metaphor is suitable an appropriate topic for Less Wrong?
Regardless, I think I will be watching this. It has something I like. Even if Hollywood doesn’t understand it.
Thank you for the heads-up. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie about anything I’m even remotely interested in.
A TED talk by David Brooks was promoted on Facebook not long ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html
I am very interested in that. My roommate told me horror stories about his STNA (State Tested Nurse’s Aide) training and I would like to know if any progress is being made in this area.
I would NOT suggest analyzing either statistical evidence or assuming that she is perhaps right about her exes. The odds are of course not with her when we ask if she has had multiple boyfriends with borderline or narcissism. What we are more likely to find is that she has the same issues many of us here on this site do, which is that she is partially mind-blind and is taking shots in the dark as we all would if we were too close to the situation
Alicorn, you are fairly accomplished on this site. What if we consider the possibility that some people are more accepting of the ‘this is the facts, folks’ sort of treatment when we are looking at a situation like this, and some people are more prone to getting relief from other sources?
I know when my father died, it was really only distance that helped me.
Perhaps we should look into a project documenting the ways in which we all might want to be comforted? I can’t think of something more ant-hill like than a science of grief, but perhaps as rationalists we ought to consider it?
While I am irked by Rabid’s response as well, I feel it necessary to point out that if this community accomplishes it’s goals, as a very young member of our community he/she has quite a lot to gain out of this site.
I say, keep at it Rabid and do not get discouraged. My advice is to retreat and think about what is going on.
It is not such a terrible thing to realize that you may have been wrong.
I’d be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one’s beliefs.
This is the story of the last year of my life. Most of the major paradigm shifts in my life I can attribute to either my own ingenuity or schooling, but this site (in a very short time span) has resulted in two shifts by itself.
So, I went to see it with a friend. It was not a disappointment. It also did not fall into the trap I thought it would inevitably fall into, where the special power granted to the hero would eventually result in his downfall. I’ll try to give a summary without any spoilers.
Eddie Morra is an akrasia-prone writer with an idea for a science-fiction novel about the human condition. His situation is fairly typical of any artist. It’s likely a place that the scriptwriter has been before. After a chance encounter with his ex-wife’s half brother (a drug dealer by trade) he finds himself in possession of a tablet of NZT-48. NZT-48 is a narrative device with the unique property being a genie that is too stupid to prevent you from wishing for more wishes. The effect of the drug is heightened awareness, access to all recorded experiences before taking the drug, savant-level capabilities in all areas of human achievement, and a tendency to create unlikely solutions to violent situations.
The movie’s treatment of the subject of wonder-nootropics is fairly mature. The maturity is far above what I would have hoped for with a Hollywood movie, particularly with a double-whammy like intelligence enhancement paired with drug use as an incentive to do some moralizing.
If I had to say the movie was ‘about’ anything, I would say it is actually about intelligence being a good thing, and the more the better. Very early on in the movie, Eddie realizes that writing sci-fi novels, schmoozing at parties and driving fast cars is fine, but there is more to life than that. In a memorable scene that will be familiar to anyone who has read a transhumanist’s life story, Eddie decides upon a long term plan which is carefully not elaborated upon in the movie.
Eddie makes some fairly foolish moves during the movie, and the plot thereby has a couple holes, but overall I recommend watching it.
Similar Characters to Eddie Morra: Adrian Veidt, Paul Atreides, Peter Wiggin.
I absolutely agree with this. I have been contemplating the ‘rationalist dojo’ and the practice of mindful rationalism pretty often recently.
I would have just upvoted this but I wanted to specify, you see...
A car accident, of course. Cars are so obviously risky, it’s amazing that they aren’t illegal.
Naturally if the Gub’ment thought statistically, various foods would be illegal first.
Anybody curious about experiencing similar things need only use Marijuana or K-2. Analyzing and overcoming/working around altered mental states is a worthwhile practice, in my opinion. It teaches you to not trust your mind in the way that boot-camp teaches you to be a soldier.
As an outright supporter of ‘consciousness expansion’ through drug induced altered states, I can say that mathematics is about the worst thing you can try to gain insight into using irrationality as a tool.
I would not say that a mind in an altered state is as bad as a random-theorem-generator, but altered states almost never result in validity in my experience. The best state of mind to do math in is a sober and logical one.
Now, if we are talking about building mental fortitude, about overcoming personal barriers and winning at life, then I would say that introducing yourself to measures of irrationality is a good idea. You get a good idea of how the ‘other side’ lives and can develop strategies for compensating for your errors, not to mention building a tolerance for stress.
Ah, footnote [4]. How you have framed my life!
It’s simply ASTOUNDING how people will pay you to do something as simple as Google a problem and then follow the steps.
My feeling is that this will lead to some sort of ‘falling through layers of hell’ kind of montage which will lead Kim to some quirky character that represents true science.
I don’t have very high confidence in this idea, as Dresden Codak is always full of surprises.
When I started thinking about this I realized that testing for rationality is pretty complicated! The hardest part about it is determining the ‘most rational person’ in a group. If the ‘most rational person’ is a member of the group being tested, how can the testers determine who they are if the testers are less rational than them? Does a tester’s ability to recognize the best of the test group depend on whether the tester is biased, and how they are biased? And who would test the testers, then?
Regardless, here’s an idea or two.
A Multilevel test: Biases may be fairly easy to test for, in general. The are relatively well defined. Someone who is known to be fairly unbiased in one respect or another could run tests for that bias.
An experimental test: Learning ability could be tested. A list of 100 skills, facts and methods could be presented to individuals in a test group. Some of the items on the list would be false, untenable or in some other way illogical. Members of the group would have to learn the useful ones, thus demonstrating their ability to overcome any biases they may have to learning this-or-that concept, trait, skill or whatever. They would also have to not learn the bogus ones, demonstrating their ability to recognize bad ideas, harmful methods and false facts, etc. Groups that did well in the experiment would could be held up as examples of how one ought to approach learning.