At that moment, he was enlightened.

I somehow felt fuzzy and nice reading this; it's so distinctly your writing style and it's nice to have you around, being you and writing in your familiar slightly quirky style. (It also communicated the point well.)

This bit irked me because it is inconsistent with a foundational way of checking and improving my brain that might be enough by itself to recover the whole of the art:

Being wrong feels exactly like being right.

This might be true in some specific situation where a sort of Epistemic Potemkin Village is being constructed for you with the goal of making it true... but otherwise, with high reliability, I think it is wrong.

Being confident feels very similar in both cases, but being confidently right enables you to predict things at the edge of your perceptions and keep "guessing right" and you kinda just get bored, whereas being confidently wrong feels different at the edges of your perceptions, with blindness there, or an aversion to looking, or a lack of curiosity, or a certainty that it is neither interesting nor important nor good".

If you go confidently forth in an area where you are wrong, you feel surprise over and over and over (unless something is watching your mind and creating what you expect in each place you look). If you're wrong about something, you either go there and get surprised, or "just feel" like not going there, or something is generating the thing you're exploring.

I think this is part of how it is possible to be genre-savvy. In fiction, there IS an optimization process that IS laying out a world, with surprises all queued up "as if you had been wrong about an objective world that existed by accident, with all correlations caused by accident and physics iterated over time". Once you're genre-savvy, you've learned to "see past the so-called surprises to the creative optimizing author of those surprises".

There are probably theorems lurking here (not that I've seen in wikipedia and checked for myself, but it makes sense), that sort of invert Aumann, and show that if the Author ever makes non-trivial choices, then an ideal bayesian reasoner will eventually catch on.

If creationism was true, and our demiurge had done a big complicated thing, then eventually "doing physics" and "becoming theologically genre-savvy" would be the SAME thing.

This not working (and hypotheses that suppose "blind mechanism" working very well) is either evidence that (1) naive creationism is false, (2) we haven't studied physics long enough, or (3) we have a demiurge and is it is a half-evil fuckhead who aims to subvert the efforts of "genre-savvy scientists" by exploiting the imperfections of our ability to update on evidence.

(A fourth hypothesis is: the "real" god (OntoGod?) is something like "math itself". Then "math" conceives of literally every universe as a logically possible data structure, including our entire spacetime and so on, often times almost by accident, like how our universe is accidentally simulated as a side effect every time anyone anywhere in the multi-verse runs Solomonoff Induction on a big enough computer. Sadly, this is basically just a new way of talking that is maybe a bit more rigorous than older ways of talking, at the cost of being unintelligible to most people. It doesn't help you predict coin flips or know the melting point of water any more precisely, so like: what's the point?)

But anyway... it all starts with "being confidently wrong feels different (out at the edges, where aversion and confusion can lurk) than being confidently right". If that were false, then we couldn't do math... but we can do math, so yay for that! <3

I think I am unclear on whether this approach differs from a more traditional "Socratic" style dialogue, and if so, in what ways. Could you clarify?

Another thought that this post brings out, is that while I think techniques of this sort are useful in a number of ways, even beyond the direct dialogue itself (for example, in practicing the kind of lateral and analogy-based thinking required to fluidly keep up with the conversation while maintaining this style), there is clearly a limited set of opportunities for which they are suitable. Do you know of any existing "taxonomy" of conversational methods, classified with respect to the circumstances in which they are most effective?

The objective of rationality is to become right instead of wrong.

I think this is technically false, in a subtle but important way. If I gained [knowledge of whether every six-digit number is prime] in exchange for [knowledge of whether wandering out into open traffic is a good idea], I'd have gleaned a net 899999 bits of right-ness, but it still wouldn't have been a worthwhile deal, or made me more rational in any practical sense. The missing gears are becoming right about important && relevant things, bothering to apply that knowledge, and - conditional on applying it at all - applying it well.

I think this project is good (Like, unusually good! It's a step forward! I enjoyed it, and I commend you for your service to the Cause!), but I notice a lack of emphasis on changing actions vs changing minds, both in this post and in the videos I watched, and I want to make sure you've noticed that too.

(And yes, I do recognize the irony of me pointing out a true thing about [pointing out true things without having an associated practical outcome] without having an associated practical outcome. Still think it's worth saying!)

A more knowledgeable person can see holes regardless of who’s right, and so training deferring to what a teacher communicates just because they seem smart and can point out flaws seems wrong.

You smile. You agree. You show genuine interest in the other person. You don't say "You're wrong". You never even say your own beliefs (unless asked). There's nothing for the person to get angry at because you never attacked them. Instead of criticizing, you point out errors indirectly, via a joke. You cheer them on as they dig their own grave. After all, you're trying to lose too.

This is something that allows you to persuade people. If you have more background knowledge about something and can say something that’d make the person you’re talking to think you pointed out a flaw/a hole in their understanding of the issue, they might defer to you, thinking you’re smarter and you help. If instead of asking “what do you think? why do you think that?”, and letting the person think on their own, you instead ask questions that communicate your understanding, then I’m not sure this actually improves their thinking or even allows them to arrive to truer beliefs in a systematic way.

If your beliefs are false, they’ll update to your false beliefs; if your models are incomplete, they’ll believe in these incomplete models and won’t start seeing holes in them.

In the second video, you didn’t ask the person where’s the money coming from and where they go and who’s better off and who’s worse off; they didn’t try to draw any schemes and figure this out for themselves. Instead, they listened to you and agreed with what you communicated to them. They didn’t have a thought that if someone builds a cable, they must expect profits to cover the cost, despite someone else possibly trying to build a cable; they didn’t think that the money going into building a cable don’t disappear; they remain in the economy, through wages and costs of everything paid to everyone involved; the actual resources humanity spends on a cable are perhaps some fuel, some amount of material, and human time. Was it unethical to spend these resources that way? What does “unethical” even mean here? Was someone hurt during the construction, did people decide to get a worker’s job instead doing art? What about trading itself- what are the positive and negative externalities, what are the resources spent by humanity as a whole? What is the pot everyone competes for? Are they spending more resources to compete for it than the pot contains, or are they just eating all the free money on the table? Do they provide something valuable to the market, getting this pot in return? (Perhaps liquidity or a lot of slightly more up-to-date information?)

I have no idea how any of this works but to me, it looked like you made your arguments in a persuasive way, but my impression is the conversation you’ve had on the second video didn’t really improve general thinking/rationality skills of the person you were talking to.

Could a basic version of this that could help many people with their reasoning easily be set up as a GPT?

I tried it:

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-x4ryeyyCd-rationalist-dojo

But still unhappy with what I am getting. If you have a good prompt to find inconsistencies in your reasoning, please share it!

"I have read 100 books about chess," I said, "Surely I must be a grandmaster by now."

A nice argument; but looking back at it the second time, I think I actually expect someone who’s read 100 books on how to play chess to be better than me at chess. I expect someone who’s read the Sequences to be significantly better than baseline at being sane and to at least share some common assumptions about important things that would allow to have more productive communication. Even if one doesn’t have the skills to notice flaws in their thinking, reading the Sequences significantly increases the chance they’ll approach a bunch of stuff well, or if specific flaws are pointed out, will notice and try to correct them. (E.g., even if they can’t notice that an argument is about definitions, if you point this out, they’ll understand it; if they updated towards some belief after an event even though it happens just as often, relatively, in works where it’s true as in worlds where it’s false, they might understand why they should rollback the update.)

Being increasingly good at rationality means being wrong less and less. It doesn’t mean immediately stopping having any holes in beliefs. Noticing holes in your beliefs takes time and practice and reflection, and the skill of it is, indeed, not automatically downloaded from the Sequences. But it’s not really about holes in models in a moment of time; it’s about whether the models predict stuff better as time passes.

I guess, my point is people shouldn’t feel bad about having holes in beliefs or understanding “little” after reading the Sequences. It’s the derivative that matters

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091674923025435

Check it out, obesity can be treated with a vaccine.

They use the AAV vector that the J&J/astrazeneca vaccines used to encode a hormone that naturally occurs in the body, shot it into fat mice, and the fat mice started excreting all their visceral fat as sebum (so they got greasy hair).

Obesity is a public health emergency, there is no lasting treatment, diet and exercise don't work for most people.  This study used more mice than the vaccine booster study did, so I think it's enough to justify an emergency use authorization, and start putting it into arms.

Also, fat people are a burden on society, they're selfish, gluttinous, require weird special engineering like large seats, and are just generally obnoxious, so anyone who is at risk of obesity (which is everyone) should be mandated to get the anti fat shot, or be denied medical care for things like organ transplants.

Am i doin it rite?

I don't think it works if there isn't a correct answer, e.g. predicting the future, but I'm positive this is a good way to improve how convincing your claims are to others.

If there isn't ground truth about a claim to refer to, any disagreement around a claim is going to be about how convincing and internally/externally consistent the claim is. As we keep learning from prediction markets, rationale don't always lead to correctness. Many cases of good heuristics (priors) doing extremely well. 

If you want to be correct, good reasoning is often a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.