Tweetable Rationality

For tweetable rationality, I follow stevenkaas, afoolswisdom, michaelvassar, vladimirnesov, and spaceandgames. I've noticed that much of what they tweet would not have been comprehensible to me much more than two years ago, though; so inferential distances may place a fairly low bound on the medium's usefulness as "rationality seeds."

There's an atheist named Greta Christina who for a while posted a short message to her blog about atheism, and encouraged all of her readers to copy and paste it to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, to spread the meme. Basically, a 140-character Talking Points Memo.

That might be a good idea here. I'll be if we had one central thread of daily (or weekly) 140-character rationality 'thoughts of the day', we could get a lot of Less Wrongers to reliably spread the same message on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Probably easiest would be to have somebody launch a new Twitter feed and regularly post these things, and then other Less Wrongers could plan on re-tweeting or Facebooking them.

To judge length, you must learn a benchmark to compare with. So too with the strength of evidence, but few know its ruler, probability.

A food sickens you in an hour, you know. In a week, you need notes. In a year, you need a study. Important things often go unnoticed.

Information diet is as important as food diet. Seek sources that teach new things, avoid sources that eat your time but give nothing back.

Learn how minds work, and how they make mistakes. You can't call a tow if your mind breaks down.

Don't guess, use numbers. Learn how to turn likelihood, strength of evidence, and goodness into numbers, so you can guess less.

Harvested from Five-minute rationality techniques:

If you suspect something is factually true, don't be afraid to believe it. It can't hurt you. -- SarahC

Gibberish is toxic; if you bend your mind to make sense of it, your whole mind warps slightly. -- Myself

Learning one was wrong (and updating) is a good thing. One should be more interested in obtaining information than winning debates. -- Violet

You shouldn't just trust whatever your thoughts say; have your second thoughts monitoring them. And have your third thoughts monitor that. -- luminosity (edited slightly for length)

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Feynman

The complete quote is "For a successful technology, reality must...", but I prefer this more general version. It was originally uttered in Feynman's appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster.

Don't debate what to believe but what to anticipate. Belief should flow from anticipation, which should be the focus of inquiry. j.mp/9YLZjx

Compressing a bit further to leave room for the 'http://' prefix would be nice, but this is as far as I could get it.

Purely for the PR angle, if we can find stuff that works as RATIONALIST HULK it might be more popular.

Wrote this in some free time during class (similar theme to Dorikka's):

When a shiny new theory you're makin'
That's non-obviously mistaken
Nature cares not a bit
How you justify it
If it disagrees with data taken

I figure limericks are good at sticking in someone's head, even if the structure makes you distort your point a little.

Yesterday as a creative activity I spent a couple hours making up tweets. It was actually really fun and cathartic! The last four had something to do with rationality:

I'm a politician and I'm not going to change my opinion because it'll make me look bad. So shut up.

Cached Selves

I'm a guy. I like that girl, so it's time to project my desires onto her and rapidly turn her off.

"Anti-game" is quite common and involves being excessively nice thereby signaling very low value. Related to how humans have difficulty modeling others (typical mind fallacy? women are pickier when choosing mates than men)

I'm a persuasive writer. Time to construct an excessively detailed but improbable scenario in order to convince you. It worked!

Related to conjunction fallacy. Inspired by my experiences: more detailed writing with imagery was more effective (perhaps because it seemed more high status)

1. Do the research and thinking (Creativity and science). 2. Make the appealing case (Charisma). Can you switch between gears?

Hold Off on Proposing Solutions. What looks smart (the confident charisma) isn't necessarily the smart thing to do. Inspired by personal experiences where political discussions were charisma competitions.

My tweets were too abstract, lacked links to LW or Wikipedia, may have been too obvious and were seen by pretty much noone.

But it sure was fun, so I encourage people to explore Alexandros' suggestion.

Don't believe everything that you think.

How do you know what you know is true?

I'm curious to know how people use Twitter and why. Do the tweets you follow pop up automatically on your phone, or do you have to go to the site to read them? What do you get from it? I've looked at Twitter a few times, and I've yet to see anything that would have repaid the effort of looking for it. What can someone say in 140 characters that you want to read? For things like "Demonstration in Tahrir Square 6pm", or "Got out of Sendai, crashing with friend in Tokyo" I can see the point, but not talking points without the talk.

What is it about these tweets that makes me cringe at every one?

This one is probably more useful for people who are already rationalists:

One person's truth-claim is another person's insult.

hypotheses that explain lots of futures are worthless. you want hypotheses that explain very few (preferably one) future.

I'm not sure these are useful for reasons previously given here.

changing my answer:

Reason explicitly!
Don't protect your ideas, offer them up to others to shred to bits.
Hit them with the strongest hammers you can find.
Be ever disloyal, constantly looking for ways to destroy the castles your reason builds.

Whatever comes through the fire has earned its place in your mind.

Where there's a smoke there's a fire. Where there's evidence there's a fact.

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself . . . that a tiger is an optical illusion--well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.

~G. K. Chesterton

Edit: I noticed that this was more than 140 characters, but it works fine for Facebook.