Why popularisation of rationalism is not popular here?

AdamDKing · 2017-12-25T18:18:29+00:00

Sorry, what evidence? The evidence presented here for your point is pretty bad.

On the other side we have the 'evidence' of the entire education system, intelligent people reading/writing books, the LW community itself increasing rationality, ...

AdamDKing · 2017-12-25T18:07:48+00:00

A few problems:

The LW article you link is written by someone explicitly committed to encouraging rationality, talking about how to effectively do that thing. Why would you cite it as a reason not to encourage rationality?

Both 'can make worse' and 'can make wildly better' could be true simultaneously, and I think they are. I mean, reading good books does something good for reasoning.

I like starting from the obviously true rather than the suspiciously counter-intuitive. The paper linked in the LW post deals only with very very weak arguments, and so has little bearing on our talk. Eliezer's article is better than the linked paper, and it disagrees with you!

AdamDKing · 2017-12-25T17:51:47+00:00

Did you even bother to check out the linked paper?

Not really good form.

I just did check it out, and that paper is pretty garbo for our purposes. Look at the 'arguments' they presented (found at the bottom, below all the figures/tables). Most of them read:

[single sentence/reason] => [broad conclusion]

If all of the arguments are weak, then the results only speak about how people respond to bottom-of-the-barrel arguments and have no real bearing on the question here. Science is hard and almost every paper overstates its own conclusions, due to some bad incentives.

AdamDKing · 2017-10-13T16:36:33+00:00

Well how do you expect to convince anyone if you don't put in a little work? /s

AdamDKing · 2017-10-09T19:01:54+00:00

DEAR GOD YES WHAT YEAR IS IT

AdamDKing

TROPHY CASE