Measuring the Sanity Waterline

That's not CFAR theory of action. CFAR's strategy rests on the idea that researching into new thinking habits is very important.

Regardless, CFAR isn't trying to raise the sanity waterline, and it isn't likely to do so by accident.

I don't think "proven to work" should be the metric anybody should use for picking medical treatments. The likely effects of the treament given it's costs and risks is a much better guide.

EY is not irrational because he tried the Shangri La diet. On for building his own high powered lamp array to treat an illness.

There are arguments for and against most of these metrics. For example, in a more sane world, the powers that be allocate resources toward either proving or disproving the efficacy of the Shangri La diet. Thus, people would be able to find out by reading the literature whether it was a good diet, one way or the other. We live in an insane world where nutrition science is stuck in an epistemically toxic equilibrium, so individual experimentation is not a crazy thing to do.

That depends a lot on how you define awareness. Many 9/11 truthers do better at quizes about world events than the average person. That doesn't stop them for believing in bad conspiracy theories.

I suspect that, all things being equal, more accurate world-knowledge is better for global sanity.

Consider the converse proposition. It would be much harder to defend the notion that "less knowledge about the world and current events is a predictor/indicator of greater rationality." It would also be relatively hard to justify a zero-correlation between world awareness and rationality.

All this goes toward proving that we need a variety of indicators. As with the 9/11 truthers, you can have a lot of world knowledge but still be lacking in the "complete basic rationality package" that Eliezer outlines and I try to summarize, and thus you still make horrible choices. A little rationality can hurt you, after all. Thus, the goal should be to track more metrics, and to make sure we're not trading them off against one another.

When it comes to metrics, good Briers score (or an similar metric) show sanity of the person who's measured.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't think this is a metric that is being widely collected, but maybe it should be.

Maybe the proper approach to raising the worldwide sanity needs to be multi-layered, simply because different people are at different levels of sanity and education. It makes no sense to debate "frequentism vs Bayes" with someone who cannot solve a quadratic equation, which describes the majority of the population.

This makes sense, and I think it's possible to boil down some concepts to simpler forms that are nonetheless still useful. In a wide variety of situations, I can help people clear up confusions about their "beliefs" by showing them how to treat all beliefs as different explanations that they are implicitly putting more or less "weight" on. It certainly helps with any confusion of the "I'm not sure what I really believe" variety, to recontextualize the problem such that the person can believe many things with a variety of certainty levels. I never have to resort to probability theory or mention Bayes.

Maybe someone could write a book about a wizard kid who used math to achieve great powers, and suddenly the math skills would skyrocket.

So, basically HPMOR with more mainstream appeal. HPMOR was actually a pretty good stab at drawing the interest of the IQ 110+ crowd, but I'll bet a similar thing could be done for the other half of the bell curve.

A measurement that measures a metric that correlates can be fine for some purposes. If you however optimize towards it you might run in Goodharts law problems.

Though if something nice has twenty correlates, and you track all 20 of those correlates, you are probably better off than tracking one very strong correlate. (Improving IQ test scores without improving everything else that correlates with IQ would be problematic, for example.)

It would be really interesting to conceive of a dystopia where all of the proposed metrics so far suggested in this post+comments were optimized without also leading to markedly improved levels of sanity.

How are you defining 'education' here? Does homeschooling count? What about trade schools? Apprenticeships?

The UN statistics that I linked only record what we could consider to be mainstream education -- school, university, graduate school/professional degrees. A truly comprehensive sanity metric would go beyond this.

If a society had a college education rate of, say, 98%, would it have a higher or lower sanity waterline than a society with a college education rate of 30% where most of the other 70% went into employer-funded job training, apprenticeships, etc.?

That's true. One has to be on the lookout for pathological social trends masquerading as widespread rationality. For example, the current US attitude that you have to go to college is looking less and less rational by the day. That said, in some other country with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities, I would consider any increase in those numbers to be a sanity improvement.

And education depresses fertility. Until widespread genetic engineering or FAI, the values of populations whose fertility rate is above (replacement rate + defection rate) will gain support, and the values of populations whose fertility rate is below it will lose support. This especially matters in democracies, as anyone who follows Israeli politics can tell you. What this means is that, even if raising tertiary education rates raises the sanity waterline in the short term (which I'm not convinced of), it will likely lower it in the long run.

There are a lot of complicated things going on with fertility rates. As a society becomes more sane, it also becomes more stable, and its overall fertility rate declines to the level of "elective" reproduction. In a truly sane society, one might imagine fertility rates ticking back up again, as overeducated adults actually obtain comprehensive financial security and feel comfortable having more children. I see myself as a possible example of this. My wife and I both have advanced degrees, but we chose to have three children because we can actually expect to provide three children with the kind of life that overeducated adults like us think they deserve.

Why? Rationalists win. To the extent that awareness about world events helps you win, awareness about world events is rational. To the extent that awareness about world events does not help you win, you may as well be an anorak.

I see "more knowledge about the world state" as being implied within the Omohudro drives. I agree that there is a saturation point. It is useful to know that there is a really bad war in Syria. It is not useful to know that parking fines in Singapore have increased by 4% in the last quarter. Unless you're traveling to Singapore. One must diligently balance gathering information versus utilizing information.

I think knowing a basic slate of facts about current events would be well correlated with sanity. What goes on this slate would be flexible and subjective, but that doesn't imply it would be useless as a measure.

How do you square this with the scientific consensus? Again, rationalists win. If you interpret the relevant studies as saying that religious people accrue benefits (social capital, a sense of meaning, a support network, etc.) from religion (rather than irreligion selecting against the personality traits that provide those things), you have to make the case that the epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human in the society you're trying to affect, and that either these gains outweigh the losses from changing religion/engineering new religions or 'saner' religions can't be created and our only choice is between Richard Dawkins and Creflo Dollar.

We're sitting at a weird point in history where we have dynamited all our social institutions except religion, so it makes religion look artificially appealing. I don't think statement "epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human" is true. I think 95% of religious people have never even been exposed to even a basic level of rationality and don't even know what it could do for them, much less for society.

Regardless of that, I think it is demonstrably true that countries with lower religiosity are, on the balance, more sane. It's not always the case, because there are other bad ideas that can take the place of religion. Thus, the need for many aggregated metrics in coming up with a final "sanity score".

I would expect a society where 18-year-olds are financially and morally (and... wisdom-ly?) capable of raising children to have a higher sanity waterline than a society where, for financial, moral, and... wisdom-al? reasons, reproduction has to be deferred to one's early thirties, unless the simplest way to raise the sanity waterline is to increase the rate of autism.

I don't think 18-year-olds can be wisdom-ly capable of raising children. But, 18 is not really adolescent. It's uncontroversial to say that a well-structured society has fewer pregnant 13-year-olds.