The Craft And The Codex

Here's a comment by Montfort that I liked from the SSC comments:

I can sort of buy the idea of the comments as a dojo – but there’s no personalized instruction or membership fees or belts or anything. The learning here is extremely self-directed, success is hard to judge objectively, and commenters come and go all the time. Still, even just an empty building with some mats where people can show up and practice is something.

That is, if you wanted to design a place to practice “rationality” skills from the ground up, I’m not sure it would look like this. But the blog and comment section can serve multiple purposes at once.

I have competing intuitions about just how much structure and scaffolding is useful for practice. I don't think schools do a lot of things right, but at least here in the US, we can count on them getting people to be literate and able to do basic arithmetic. I'm wondering what a "minimum set" of rationality techniques would look like, things you could teach to people at scale.

First off, Scott’s blog is awesome.

Second, the example of dieting comes to mind when I think of training rationality. While they’re not much connected to the rationality community, they are a large group of people focused on overcoming one particular aspect of our irrationallity. (but without much success)