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Notes -
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 don’t think it reasonable to call the average person stupid in the sense that they’re incapable of learning it. Most have never actually been taught to think in that manner, and as such lack the skill set. Part of thinking well is the toolset, and part of it is being able to (and choosing to) read widely enough to make good use of the tools in that skill set.
Education, at least in non-elite American schools is not built to create thinkers. Nobody funding the schools or hiring the graduates cares if they can think (and other than the cognitive elite type jobs in high level stem, thinking is a net negative as thinkers are hard to control). As such the system is set up for mostly rote learning— what the classical education model calls grammar. Memorize and recall, perform mathematical equations. That’s all well and good, but that’s not going to create a thinker. There’s the next step where kids learn to understand why that works, or to learn to apply what they’ve learned, and to analyze texts, equations and problems to understand what’s being done and why.
Absent that, most people developed proxies that mostly work. Finding a “priest” type who you trust on a topic, trusting a given set of sources, using the canonical list of fallacies, or trusting the guy in the argument who sounds like Spock. Those sort of work most of the time, provided those you’re trusting are honest and knowledgeable. The trouble is that it’s not hard to know the tricks most people use as rationalist proxies and positioning yourself to appeal to those instincts.
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