Secret Identities vs. Groupthink

The karma system motivates people not to bring up things not already known to the other members. People will be less interested, and more likely to ding them for "not being relevant" (or because they misunderstand it). For instance, the recent post on E-Prime was relevant; very short; interesting; and even practical. Yet it's still sitting there at 0.

I've noticed that very smart people often go to great effort to spend time with other very smart people; and then, instead of listening to them, try to talk as much as they can. Which defeats much of the purpose of spending time with very smart people. This indicates that the motivation for joining groups is as much to impress them, as to learn from them.

It would be very surprising if groups did not spend most of their time discussing things most of them already know. That would mean that the groups consisted mainly of people who were interested in a subject, yet uninformed about it.

A related request: there are a lot of goals common enough that better achieving these goals should be of interest to a large-ish portion of LW. I'm thinking here of: happiness; income; health; avoiding auto accidents; reading more effectively; building better relationships with friends, family, dating partners, or co-workers; operationalizing one's goals to better track progress; more easily shedding old habits and gaining new ones.

Could we use our combined knowledge base, and our ability to actually value empirical data and consider counter-evidence and so on, to find and share some of the better known strategies for achieving these goals? (Strategies that have already been published or empirically validated, but that many of us probably haven’t heard?) We probably don’t want to have loads and loads of specific-goaled articles or links, because we don’t want to look like just any old random internet self-help site. But a medium amount of high-quality research, backed by statistics, with the LW-community’s help noticing the flaws or counter-arguments -- this sounds useful to me. Really useful. Much of the advantage of rationality comes from, like, actually using that rationality to sort through what’s known and to find and implement existing best practices. And truth being singular, there’s no reason we should each have to repeat this research separately, at least for the goals many of us share.

Though I guess Eliezer’s caution is worth attention.

I'd just like to point out that this is a generally excellent post. It contains a link to an empirical study involving a rationality-related topic, followed by some analysis and links to LW/OB, followed by specific questions for discussion.

More posts like this!

Each of us has, or should have, a secret identity.

What, so now I need to have impressive achievements just to read about rationality? Look, I'm sorry I'm so stupid and useless, but at least let me bask in your glory, okay?

Interesting. Reading your post, it struck me that this is precisely how my best friendships operate.

That is, I seldom see them more than once a week, and although they're true brother's who I know will have my back, if we don't have anything interesting to discuss we'd rather not see each other - even when we miss hanging out.

If there are any psychologists/sociologists on here, perhaps they could expand on this.