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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3630 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I was reading a comment about how people that learn rationality often appear unhappy. It caused to reflect and think of a larger pattern.

I think rationality can cause people to go through something like the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So, while rationality concepts can cause some people to become unhappy it can often be just a temporary state.

Has studying rationality concepts caused you to go through a cycle of emotional states?

Not really. Even before I was a Rationalist, I was still regularly dismayed by civilizational inadequacy and how fucking stupid the average person is.

I'm a smart person, and I'm certain that even if I hadn't discovered LW or Scott in my late teens, I'd have wandered into spaces where I'd have heard the same concepts eventually.

To me, rationality is both the art of clear thinking, and as Yudkowsky puts it, winning. Reasonably educated humans usually think quite clearly already when it comes to truly important decisions, so I don't really expect an introduction to formal Rationalist concepts to revolutionize someone's life barring those who go into EA, AI Alignment or sign up for cryonics.

You don't have to be a rat to worry about AI or x-risk, and while I've certainly felt existential terror at times, I cope quite well.

I'm a smart person, and I'm certain that even if I hadn't discovered LW or Scott in my late teens, I'd have wandered into spaces where I'd have heard the same concepts eventually.

Don't be so sure. When I was in college, these places DIDN'T EXIST. It took the internet to bring together the critical mass to make it happen.

You certainly weren't going to be exposed to rationalist ideas on a typical college campus or by reading the New Yorker or the Economist or anything. The gulf between the writing of someone like Scott, and the publications available to a layperson in the 1990s is vast.

Even today, let's say TheMotte/SSC/LessWrong don't exist. Where are you going to get information that isn't hopelessly normie biased?

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