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Adults have trouble with all this stuff because mostly they don't learn it at all, even with a liberal arts education or any of the other things you mention. Th

Adults have trouble with all this stuff because mostly they don't learn it at all, even with a liberal arts education or any of the other things you mention. The entire rationalism movement is essentially founded based on the fact that ostensibly educated people don't realize how badly their brains work by default. The greatest superpower we have as humans is that we have the ability to introspect, and second guess our immediate responses in light of what we've learned. That allows us to jump to conclusions much quicker on shoddy evidence, because we can course correct later as we gather more, and it's super effective as a learning strategy. Learning how to better correct our initial hypotheses helps us perform even better, but it requires us to actually study the things that humans tend to get wrong. Most education, professions, and life experiences do not support that goal, so it's an easy win if you go outside the system to do so.

jacobolus 9y ago
Judging from the people I know who identify themselves with the “rationalism movement”, occasionally reading topical blog posts doesn’t inherently teach introspection (or even reasoning) any better than high school, though its adherents are pretty good at rattling off lists of logical fallacies and getting distracted by meta-arguments about which particular one applies in a given situation. [Or by “rationalism movement” are you talking about, say, philosophy / sociology / anthropology / behavioral economics / history Ph.Ds or licensed psychiatrists? That would be something like the years of dedicated training I was talking about, though those fields have different modes of inquiry and different subjects of study, and some are surely better at reasoning / rhetoric / self reflection than others.]
- ewjordan 9y ago
  You're right, reading occasional blog posts doesn't do anything for anyone, on pretty much any topic. I'd argue that anyone professing to be a rationalist on those grounds is lying to themselves. Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.

jacobolus 9y ago

Judging from the people I know who identify themselves with the “rationalism movement”, occasionally reading topical blog posts doesn’t inherently teach introspection (or even reasoning) any better than high school, though its adherents are pretty good at rattling off lists of logical fallacies and getting distracted by meta-arguments about which particular one applies in a given situation. [Or by “rationalism movement” are you talking about, say, philosophy / sociology / anthropology / behavioral economics / history Ph.Ds or licensed psychiatrists? That would be something like the years of dedicated training I was talking about, though those fields have different modes of inquiry and different subjects of study, and some are surely better at reasoning / rhetoric / self reflection than others.]

ewjordan 9y ago
You're right, reading occasional blog posts doesn't do anything for anyone, on pretty much any topic. I'd argue that anyone professing to be a rationalist on those grounds is lying to themselves. Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.