3:41pm August 4, 2013

➸ Musings of Ade: shitifindon: “When facing a difficult decision, I check which...

intersectional-beheadings:

youneedacat:

shitifindon:

“When facing a difficult decision, I check which considerations are consequentialist – which considerations are actually about future consequences. (Recent example from Eliezer: I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the…

It’s not from LW. I gave up on LW being remotely comprehensible years ago.

It’s from a project that’s done by some of the same people (including an old friend of mine, which is pretty much the only reason I was reading it) that’s supposedly about teaching their methods to people who haven’t learned them already. Although if they manage to be that confusing in their rationality worksheet thing, they might be teaching to people who actually already know this stuff? Idk..

If we’re talking about CFAR, I’m pretty sure that’s in the “sell product to wealthy people" stage of existence.

Not that I approve of that being a strategy, but. (I actually quit a really lucrative job last year because I can’t stand that thing.) I helped write examples like this, and if I had expected them to be for people like me, I would have changed the example.

My favorite example of the sunk cost fallacy is someone riding a bus, and realizing they might have missed their stop, but feeling “since they’re already past their stop, it can’t hurt to stay on the bus.“ Noticing that this is just an excuse to avoid being embarrassed is useful no matter how much money you have. And, the example stated is the most useful for the audience CFAR is trying to target - wealthy young Silicon Valley types that don’t have a lot of lifeskills. It’s not zero-cost to change the example.

Since the web site is public now, it’s not zero-cost to maintain it now, either. I would add my example if I worked with CFAR, but I don’t have enough time to.

I have a naive idea that rationality and lifeskills pair well. (I am eighteen; most of the relevant people are in their late twenties and early thirties, and think I am silly and idealistic. This is fair.)

I really want to translate Less Wrong style rationality - 48 Laws of Power, the Less Wrong sequences, Psychology of Persuasion - into plain english. When I had enough spoons to read them, the named sources helped me understand the world I live in. If I rewrite them, more people could use them.

I want to see if lifeskills that are about lifeskills ("meta-lifeskills”, if that’s not too buzzword-ey) can be taught to everyone, or if those just plain are inaccessible to some people. I don’t think they are, I just think it’s done that way, because male, white nonautistics or “"people with Asperger’s”“ tend to be the ones who can deal with the culture surrounding rationality.

I don’t know if this makes sense, sorry.

Theoretically - by which I mean ‘according to the stated CFAR/LW definition of what rationality is’ - life skills and rationality are definitely related.

In practice, LW goes about that weirdly - the pattern as I see it is that they scrupulously avoid anything that could be taken as implying that the reader is anything but perfect with basic mainstream stuff, so that mostly leaves them with ‘hey, look at this shiny new untested thing that theoretically works perfectly’ type stuff, or personal accounts of the writer having a life skills issue and resolving it - which of course tend to be spun to put the writer in the best possible light or framed in such a way as to play up the author’s other ‘virtues’ (e.g. having money) or both, because humans. (The main exception to this is in the realm of social and emotional stuff, at which everyone is assumed to be fairly incompetent and not worth trying to relate anything of even intermediate complexity to.)

Translating stuff would be cool! I’ve kind of wanted to do some Discordian parables (Monk Nopants stories are gr8) to that effect, but writing like that is not so much my thing. Also, done well and in a more general format, that kind of translation might work well on the new wiki.

(I’m not a regular reader of LW any more, but that’s actually because I got bored with it, not because I wasn’t able to tolerate the culture - yuppies goona yup, that doesn’t bug me.)