What subjects are important to rationality, but not covered in Less Wrong?

I have felt for a long time that LW is short of discussion of what you might call "collective rationality": the art of effective collaborative truth-seeking. Of course LW is itself an attempt at collective rationality; but most of us, much of the time, are engaged in activities that (1) involve multiple people, (2) would benefit from better truth-finding techniques, and (3) are not Less Wrong.

In descending order of importance:

1. Instrumental rationality.
2. How to actually practice becoming more rational.
3. Rationality via cluster thinking and intelligent imitation.

For example, I expect that sociology has a lot to say about many of our cultural assumptions. It is quite possible that 95% of it is either obvious or junk, but almost all fields have that 5% within them that could be valuable. Another area of study that might be interesting to consider is anthropology. Again this is a field that allows us to step outside of our cultural assumptions.

Both of these are highly politicized fields, which suggests to me that an attempt to extract value is going to run into many difficulties. Even presenting correctly extracted value is fraught--if the moral of the story is "by the way, an entire field of academia threw away the truth fifty years ago and has been a joke since then" that moral cannot be presented without being recognized as a partisan position, and thus seen as a political move.

Business, and the many subfields thereof.

I've been hanging around LW for a number of years now, and only recently have begun learning anything about business. I've often been struck at how relevant much of what we cover is to "the art of human rationality." The following topics or oft-repeated themes are potential gold mines:

• marketing (both the analytical and the strategic sides)
• sales
• finance (a wealth--ha!--of material on value measurement, risk/uncertainty/probability, discount rates, and prediction)
• cross-cultural communication
• habituation and effective training methodology
• human resources
• time management
• project management
• motivation and morale
• group dynamics
• conflict management
• communication styles
• goal definition
• measurement of outcomes
• effective means of keeping accountable to goals
• the importance of admitting mistakes early (stubbornness can pay off, but it's usually veeeeery costly)
• the importance of learning from mistakes--yours and others'
• the importance of continuous incremental improvement (e.g., the role of Six Sigma at GE and Motorola)

Business scholarly literature includes theoretical articles and case studies. The theoretical articles are often trivial or ill founded. But the case studies are very valuable for me--I naturally err on the side of excessive abstraction. Like fiction, case studies provide the reader with vicarious experience from which s/he can learn--but of course the events in the case study are real and nothing is obscured or exaggerated for the sake of entertainment.

A great strength of business literature is its clarity. Perhaps because the audience is assumed to be exceptionally impatient and busy, most articles are neatly paragraphed, feature helpful graphics, and have the business equivalent of "tl;dr" all over the place.

Another reason LWers might be interested in business is, of course, that business success leads to more wealth, which enables more philanthropy.

Edited: fixed a word and added a bullet

History.

A lot of people support their ideological views by popular history, which is full of biases.

I'd like to see more discussion of the problems with the scientific approach. It would show that LW is up to speed with current developments , rather than laboriously reinventing logical positivism. The approach up to now has been more about cheerleading.

A retooling of references to people that includes people. Much talk of we, us, humans, people, minds in a way that indicates all. But what is meant is high intelligence, high education and mentally conventional people.

Discussion of all people that doesn't include low intelligence, low education, mentally variant people is not discussion of all people. Infants and sleeping people should also to be included in discussions of all people and they usually are not. The minds of infants and sleeping people is different as can be from adults and waking people. And then there's drunk people and high people.

Or less wrong could rely on 'you know what I mean, all people but not all people' as it does now.

I try to either say I'm talking about some people or talk about all people as all people but not confuse the two in my posts.

...and kin selection. Don't forget kin selection!

In many ferns, two or more (close) species can cross, giving viable progeny, which can have a range of outcomes. Often, whole new species are founded and enter the competition. There are Strategies (hybrids don't develop female reproductive organs, meaning they aren't 'polluted' by parents' genomes; yetthey produce sperm and so can fertilize parents etc.) and Counter-Strategies (inhibiting others' growth, having faster sperm etc). It's a whole world and it gives one this utterly breathtaking feeling that evolution is:)

I don't know if this is highly relevant, and moreover interesting to the majority here, but shouldn't AI-designers also read things like 'Leprosy spreads by reprogramming nerve cells into migratory stem cells'? I know about how you mustn't just make blind analogies, but - this is a strategy designed by evolution, highly successful on human wetware - are there any analogies to be made with how computers are fallible?

Anyway, I would welcome posts about complex mechanisms of neural diseases, but maybe that's just my thing. I would like to see illness demystified, and maybe fear it less.

almost all fields have that 5% within them that could be valuable

The problem is that different people consider different 5% to be valuable X-)

I know its supposed to be considered a "dark art" here, but what about debate techniques and styles, persuasive writing, rhetoric, that sort of thing? Not to trick people into believing something that's false, but to effectively persuade people to believe something that's true, using time-tested methods of getting your point across. I don't believe anything is actually a dark art; anything can be good or bad depending on how you use it.

It should be possible to have a sane discussion of politics here. Even if we accept the idea that politics naturally leads to mind-killing (which I still don't agree it does), the rationalist approach should be to be constantly aware of the bug in our heads and devise mechanisms to compensate for it.

Parenthood as Optimizing for Multiple Goals.

I mean, when your kid is born, you are expected to be a parent first and foremost, yet (at least in my case) you often want to actually be someone, do something that keeps you immersed in life as you knew it. (I apologise if I offend anyone here.) It's easy to say to people: 'Hey, just wait until he goes to school, you'll get more time!' - you might not get more time, not ever. And I don't mean it just as missed career opportunities.

I have watched (still do) my Mom entertain herself with hand-crafts, etc., trying her hand at drumming (she plays piano, but she prefers drums because it's easy to do in groups), now that her daughters all grew up and she has spare time when she's not at work. And I keep thinking: is she just filling in holes, or is this what she's really wanted to do?.. It seems so sad. (Not that I'm against hand-crafts, or anything, but I don't want it to happen to myself.)

(Maybe this is a sub-clause of 'instrumental rationality', dunno.)

Some old dated worldviews have been critisised for their lack of technical accuracy. However I have seen tendency to take technical statements and turn them into worldviews. I am suspecting that this is not a valid operation and it is used to hide cultural imports. That are fo the form "A->B" where A is heavily supported by evidence but the implication is very suspect. Statements like "if the moon is made of rocks, then the moon is a evil place. We have moon rock samples so clearly the moon is evil". These are tricky in the sense that while it is clear what is meant by moon being rocky the actual payload is made of terms that are not (at least handily or unambigiously) turnable into technical details. This kind of gist that seems to be a different thing from technical accuracy seems to be often dismissed as giberrish or nonsense by those that want to focus on facts (thus it becomes true->false which is a true implication). However seems to be that even if all your thoughts would be "literally" or techincally accurate there would still be something essential missing from full sanity. What it could be and if any "canditates" for it are known to be defective or adeqaute approximations would be interesting to read about.

For example, I expect that sociology has a lot to say about many of our cultural assumptions. It is quite possible that 95% of it is either obvious or junk, but almost all fields have that 5% within them that could be valuable.

While I agree, doesn't it take already possessing a measure of rationality, or something, to pick out the valuable 5% of a field from between the pile of 95% junk. Sociology is presently as popular as it is because enough people thought it was a field that was valuable. They thought a lot of the 95% wasn't junk, even though it still was. What would we do different to do a better job extracting value? There are two failure modes:

1. either we end up believing junk has value.
2. or, we end up throwing the valuable in with the junk, passing it over, and being no better off.

The missing topics are labeled Taboo. I believe the Less Wrong community could contribute quite a bit to each of these but they are just too painful. I wish there was a way to discuss aspects of them without falling into the tired ruts. I am convinced that some LWers have gone down these paths and returned or discovered something insightful. But the current Taboos on it makes it difficult to broach these topics. Also there are trolls for many of them...

• Diets (Keto, low carb)
• Democracy (NRx)
• Red pill (PUA)
• IQ (gender, race, culture, marshmallows)
• Climate change (science theory)