7 ms·

A Test to Measure How Rational You Really Are

58 points by gojomo 13y ago

realitygrill 13y ago
Well, the people over at the Center for Applied Rationality have tried to work on something like this, if only to attempt to better measure the effects of their workshops. I suspect this is a very hard undertaking.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cdi 13y ago
I think they will find eventually that rationality is a cultural/educational thing.
- oblique63 13y ago
  The best way to test this would be to approach it like Intelligence research originally approached that hypothesis for IQ scores: by testing a reasonably large set of twins separated at birth. That's such a tricky criteria to come by, I can't imagine it'll be easy to do again, but it did help cement the idea that IQ was likely not significantly impacted cultural/environmental factors, and thus possibly a result of subtle genetic traits. The interesting thing about those studies though, was that the separated twins tended to have a lot of other unexpectedly subtle quirks in common too (such as sense of humor). So in that context, I actually wouldn't be surprised if rationality falls under those similarities as well.
tokenadult 13y ago
The profiled psychologist doing the research discussed in this interesting submission mentions his book What Intelligence Tests Miss, http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626 http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626 and I have recommended that book repeatedly in Hacker News discussion over the years. The book is readable, interesting, and surprising, and the bibliography cites most of the best recent research on human cognition.
berntb 13y ago
I used to naively assume that intelligence implied rationality. An old work colleague taught me differently. My old work friend was really intelligent. He had been considering a PhD in philosophy and had problems to stop talking about Wittgenstein. On one hand, this guy had a large interest -- and deep studies -- on the subjects of language meaning, epistemology, logic, the scientific method, etc. On the other hand, he believed in conspiracy theories like being a 9/11 truther, etc. I tried to discuss this contradiction with him, but probably tried to reason on a too low level. I argued that there is an infinite number of conspiracy theories that would satisfy the available facts. It might have worked better to simply ask: "What does your philosophy studies say about conspiracy theories based on hand picked facts?" Such a sad, sad waste of a good brain.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  > I argued that there is an infinite number of conspiracy theories that would satisfy the available facts. Thus, you can't say it wasn't a conspiracy. Yeah, you can't say it was one either. Both of you are jumping to conclusions, what's irrational by the definition of the article.
  - berntb 13y ago
    I'm not going to discuss arguments about one of the beliefs of a non-rational person. If you feel a pressing need to iron out the finer distinctions of such stuff, I'm certain there are multiple suitable sub-reddits. (But I'll add: There are also an infinite number of non-conspiracy theories fitting the facts.) Edit: coldtea, sorry I'm not going to discuss e.g. if an infinite number of possible alien species could be responsible for 9/11. (And no, not even if the possibly existing alien species are enumerable :-) ) See above. I might, if I had more time.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >There are also an infinite number of non-conspiracy theories fitting the facts. That's wrong too. Social life and human action don't have infinite possibilities. Depending on what scale you draw the line for detail, there are is a finite number of theories fitting any fact -- and less of them, if you include possibilities (Ocamm's razor). And the more facts you have, the smaller the number of theories becomes.
twoodfin 13y ago
I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic. No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title the chapter 1 "teaser" of his book "Inside George W. Bush's Mind". It's available here: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p... Maybe he's being cagey about it because his "evidence" is incredibly weak sauce. He expects most of the audience for his book to nod along when he describes a guy who managed to achieve the highest political office in an incredibly competitive environment as unable to make rational decisions. He cites for his analysis of GWB's cognitive function a whole two people. First, there's David Frum[1], who served as a speechwriter for 13 months from early 2001 to early 2002. Before that he had "no connection to the campaign or the Bush family". He's used that stint to great career effect, but seriously, there are a lot of folks who worked more closely with Bush for a longer period of time and have written about his thought and leadership style. Surely if Stanovich wasn't just looking for a good "hook" to snare his liberal readership, he could have found better sources, critical and otherwise[2]. Oh, and Frum was a huge initial supporter of the Iraq invasion, and obviously Stanovich or his imagined readership wouldn't dream of calling that a clearly irrational decision. Second, there's a bit from a George Will column. The section in italics was strangely omitted by Stanovich: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections." So which U.S. presidents weren't "dysrationalic" by this standard? This guy may be a terrific research psychologist, but he's obviously not above slandering a president and pandering to his readership with bad scholarship just to sell books. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum [2] http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
- x0x0 13y ago
  Yet George Bush's presidency is widely acknowledge to be, well, a fail parade. Or perhaps we should go with by their works ye shall judge them. An (extremely brief) overview of Bush's presidency: * he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now") * he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina) * he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora * he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11; * by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs * Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends) * Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran So your link, in which the author writes, [...] President Bush's thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to consistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied by psychiatrists and that can be measured with at least some precision. However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderatively high IQ. Bush's cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests, but they do impair rational decision making. [1] is, in retrospect, incisive. [1] http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...
coldcode 13y ago
Reading this makes me wonder if our brains are intelligent or rational enough to understand our intelligence or rationality.
tunesmith 13y ago
One thing I'm stuck regarding rationality vs instinct - I'm partial to the argument that the reason we have heuristics or "rules of thumbs" is because it saves our energy. If we invest fully rational mental energy on every decision, then we wouldn't get as much done. Heuristics are useful because they are useful, usually correct, and save time/energy. However, they are also sometimes wrong. And I also know that cognitive biases can lead us astray in the same way that a heuristic can be wrong. And that's where rationality is useful, because it helps us make the correct decision in those cases. If both are true, then the optimized way of living would be to use heuristics where they don't get you in trouble, and use rational examination when the result would be counterintuitive. Here's where I'm stuck - how do you recognize ahead of time when you should ignore your instinct/heuristic/cognitive-bias, and instead use the more exhaustive rational examination? It's as if we need to develop an intuitive skill on when to recognize that a reality is likely to be counterintuitive. "Oh, my gut tells me that this is one of those cases where my gut will be wrong." Which seems a bit contradictory.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  The stakes in your decision? If doing a full rational analysis has a cost in time and effort, but leads to a more accurate result on average, there's a level of risk/reward at which it's worth applying and one where it's not. Of course, identifying the crossover point would seem to require a second-order heuristic...
- Amadou 13y ago
  I think the name for that skill is "wisdom." You only really get that sort of insight from experience.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  It does seem contradictory, but it's not. You definitely learn to recognize your biases, it's a skill. There have been many times when I've caught myself thinking something, only to then say "wait a minute, I've just fallen victim to bias X" and then reversed my decision or opinion. I'm not great at it, but I'm very happy that it catches at least some of my brain's bugs.
- 13y ago
beefman 13y ago
Define "rational". Psychologists like Kahneman often say they're using some agreed-upon definition that exists outside their field. But applications of Bernoulli and Bayes are an area of ongoing research, even narrowly [1][2]. More generally, no theory of general intelligence exists, and to assume you can trick intelligent agents like humans with simplistic experiments is unconvincing IMO. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proebsting%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proebsting%27s_paradox [2] http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/statistical_physics_attacks_st_petersburg_paradox_resolved-96549 http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/statistical_physi...
adambratt 13y ago
Fellow readers, what's the best book you've read for improving your critical thinking/rationality?
- alok-g 13y ago
  This may be overwhelming but can help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases While I am not there yet myself with most of the biases, it seems that memorizing the name of a bias once you understand it helps you spot it more often in the daily life. [Sorry I do not know which cognitive bias would that be! :-)]
  - adambratt 13y ago
    Yeah, I wish I could find a good tool/site for quizzing myself on these. Something that would give me a paragraph and ask me to name the bias present if any.
    - alok-g 13y ago
      That would be nice indeed. Let me also know if you find something! :-) Thanks.
    - denzil 13y ago
      Anki has some decks like that: http://ankisrs.net/ http://ankisrs.net/
      - alok-g 13y ago
        Can you please point to the decks? I see only the software on that URL.
- MaysonL 13y ago
  The user Illusion The Commanding Self Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
dakimov 13y ago
I can measure how rational you really are. The result is around zero. Seriously, come on, people are not rationally thinking creatures at all, nobody is. There is nothing to even measure. If everybody became rational, the world would collapse instantly. Do you realize how many people would cease their socially indispensable work if they acted perfectly rational from an individual (meaning egotistical) perspective? I clearly see that I am irrational, but I cannot stop being so. I estimate that in order to become rationally thinking, I would have to undergo an unbearably painful transformation of my entire mental entity. My mind just works that way, it is hardwired irrationally, as any other human's mind. The article and the attempt itself are great though.
- markdown 13y ago
  > Do you realize how many people would cease their socially indispensable work if they acted perfectly rational from an individual (meaning egotistical) perspective? It is often in the interest of individuals to contribute to the group.
jdpage 13y ago
Depending on how rigorously the research on this is done, this is a test I might actually take, especially since, as he says in the article, a lot of it is stuff you can improve if you find yourself lacking. On the other hand, I don't want to take an IQ test. This is because you end up with a number which can now be used to place you on a scale relative to others, which as far as I'm concerned is fairly useless[1]. I'd much rather be judged based on what I've done rather on some number that purports to measure my potential. [1] In my (fairly limited, I grant) experience, IQ scores are mostly used by insecure navel-gazers as a sort of bragging right.
MikeCapone 13y ago
Most here are probably already aware of it, but for those who have somehow managed not to find this treasure trove: A great place to study the art of human rationality is LessWrong.com. The 'sequences' are the place to start: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
- krichman 13y ago
  I have a hard time reading Yudkowsky. I'm not as in love with his writing as he is. I think he makes good points. But if you're starting from the position of evidence-based beliefs and Bayesian reasoning, the knowledge gained by suffering through a longwinded essay seems too little. I have tried a few times, because others seem to love Less Wrong, but each time I found I came away with little or no new information.
  - MikeCapone 13y ago
    1) No writer can please everybody, so it's fine if he's not your style. 2) Have you read only a few things that he wrote about, for example, the better known cognitive biases and such, or have you also read some of the more advanced sequences? Because if you're reading the advanced essays and feel you already know all that stuff, you are a very rare breed -- good for you! I hope you're working on some hard problem in an un-sexy field and not building another photo-sharing app :) To quote Dr. Aubrey de Grey: >It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later. 3) When someone says they don't like something that I like, I ask them what is it that they like. I figure maybe they've found something even better and I'd love to get my hands on it too, and it's also a good way to see if they're just signalling superiority by disliking things that many others like. So what would you recommend I read to learn more about human rationality? Anything other than the usual suspects (Jayne, Kahneman, Tversky, Schelling, Hatie & Dawes, etc)? Thanks.
    - krichman 13y ago
D9u 13y ago
The irony that a site which uses the word "ethics" in its title would host such unethical content. The bit about Bush should have been omitted. But, that may just be my irrationality.
stiff 13y ago
The notion of domain-independent rationality is the favourite way for some nerds (so called "sceptics") to pump up their egos and then throw around nonsensical judgements in domains they don't know the first thing about. But hey, they know the Bayes theorem! So they will out-smart everyone on every topic! In some sense this is an intellectual philosophers stone, the notion (it is never said out loud but that is what seems to happen subconsciously) that once you are "rational" enough you can judge things more effectively without having expertise in a given field, medicine for example. A good example is Nassim Taleb's last book, a collection of completely ridiculous opinions on biology, medicine, computing and fitness...

58 points by gojomo 13y ago

Well, the people over at the Center for Applied Rationality have tried to work on something like this, if only to attempt to better measure the effects of their workshops. I suspect this is a very hard undertaking.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cdi 13y ago

I think they will find eventually that rationality is a cultural/educational thing.

oblique63 13y ago
The best way to test this would be to approach it like Intelligence research originally approached that hypothesis for IQ scores: by testing a reasonably large set of twins separated at birth. That's such a tricky criteria to come by, I can't imagine it'll be easy to do again, but it did help cement the idea that IQ was likely not significantly impacted cultural/environmental factors, and thus possibly a result of subtle genetic traits. The interesting thing about those studies though, was that the separated twins tended to have a lot of other unexpectedly subtle quirks in common too (such as sense of humor). So in that context, I actually wouldn't be surprised if rationality falls under those similarities as well.

tokenadult 13y ago

The profiled psychologist doing the research discussed in this interesting submission mentions his book What Intelligence Tests Miss, http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626 http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626 and I have recommended that book repeatedly in Hacker News discussion over the years. The book is readable, interesting, and surprising, and the bibliography cites most of the best recent research on human cognition.

berntb 13y ago

I used to naively assume that intelligence implied rationality. An old work colleague taught me differently. My old work friend was really intelligent. He had been considering a PhD in philosophy and had problems to stop talking about Wittgenstein. On one hand, this guy had a large interest -- and deep studies -- on the subjects of language meaning, epistemology, logic, the scientific method, etc. On the other hand, he believed in conspiracy theories like being a 9/11 truther, etc. I tried to discuss this contradiction with him, but probably tried to reason on a too low level. I argued that there is an infinite number of conspiracy theories that would satisfy the available facts. It might have worked better to simply ask: "What does your philosophy studies say about conspiracy theories based on hand picked facts?" Such a sad, sad waste of a good brain.

marcosdumay 13y ago
> I argued that there is an infinite number of conspiracy theories that would satisfy the available facts. Thus, you can't say it wasn't a conspiracy. Yeah, you can't say it was one either. Both of you are jumping to conclusions, what's irrational by the definition of the article.
- berntb 13y ago
  I'm not going to discuss arguments about one of the beliefs of a non-rational person. If you feel a pressing need to iron out the finer distinctions of such stuff, I'm certain there are multiple suitable sub-reddits. (But I'll add: There are also an infinite number of non-conspiracy theories fitting the facts.) Edit: coldtea, sorry I'm not going to discuss e.g. if an infinite number of possible alien species could be responsible for 9/11. (And no, not even if the possibly existing alien species are enumerable :-) ) See above. I might, if I had more time.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >There are also an infinite number of non-conspiracy theories fitting the facts. That's wrong too. Social life and human action don't have infinite possibilities. Depending on what scale you draw the line for detail, there are is a finite number of theories fitting any fact -- and less of them, if you include possibilities (Ocamm's razor). And the more facts you have, the smaller the number of theories becomes.

twoodfin 13y ago

I also discuss how many feel that George W. Bush was dysrationalic. No, he outright makes that "diagnosis" of the former president, going so far as to title the chapter 1 "teaser" of his book "Inside George W. Bush's Mind". It's available here: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p... Maybe he's being cagey about it because his "evidence" is incredibly weak sauce. He expects most of the audience for his book to nod along when he describes a guy who managed to achieve the highest political office in an incredibly competitive environment as unable to make rational decisions. He cites for his analysis of GWB's cognitive function a whole two people. First, there's David Frum[1], who served as a speechwriter for 13 months from early 2001 to early 2002. Before that he had "no connection to the campaign or the Bush family". He's used that stint to great career effect, but seriously, there are a lot of folks who worked more closely with Bush for a longer period of time and have written about his thought and leadership style. Surely if Stanovich wasn't just looking for a good "hook" to snare his liberal readership, he could have found better sources, critical and otherwise[2]. Oh, and Frum was a huge initial supporter of the Iraq invasion, and obviously Stanovich or his imagined readership wouldn't dream of calling that a clearly irrational decision. Second, there's a bit from a George Will column. The section in italics was strangely omitted by Stanovich: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections." So which U.S. presidents weren't "dysrationalic" by this standard? This guy may be a terrific research psychologist, but he's obviously not above slandering a president and pandering to his readership with bad scholarship just to sell books. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum [2] http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

x0x0 13y ago
Yet George Bush's presidency is widely acknowledge to be, well, a fail parade. Or perhaps we should go with by their works ye shall judge them. An (extremely brief) overview of Bush's presidency: * he waved off warnings of Bin Laden ("All right. You’ve covered your ass, now") * he turned a highly effective -- under clinton -- national disaster agency into a joke, at least in part by putting a failed horse judge in charge of it, then oversaw an ineffective response to one of the largest national disasters to ever strike the US (katrina) * he lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora * he and his chosen vp and sec state back channeled incredibly wrong information into the public, in part via the nyt, in order to sell a war with, well, people who had no weapons of mass destruction and who were uninvolved in 9/11; * by the by on the above, he fired the general (shinseki) who gave an accurate prediction of iraq war costs * Bush hired wolfowitz, who predicted the iraq war would cost between $10 and $100B (what's $700B and counting between friends) * Bush ignored, well, basically everyone who understood much of anything about the middle east in favor of a war which wildly destabilized a highly geopolitically important (oil) zone, while empowering iran So your link, in which the author writes, [...] President Bush's thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to consistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied by psychiatrists and that can be measured with at least some precision. However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderatively high IQ. Bush's cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests, but they do impair rational decision making. [1] is, in retrospect, incisive. [1] http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.pdf http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/stanovich_what.p...

coldcode 13y ago

Reading this makes me wonder if our brains are intelligent or rational enough to understand our intelligence or rationality.

tunesmith 13y ago

One thing I'm stuck regarding rationality vs instinct - I'm partial to the argument that the reason we have heuristics or "rules of thumbs" is because it saves our energy. If we invest fully rational mental energy on every decision, then we wouldn't get as much done. Heuristics are useful because they are useful, usually correct, and save time/energy. However, they are also sometimes wrong. And I also know that cognitive biases can lead us astray in the same way that a heuristic can be wrong. And that's where rationality is useful, because it helps us make the correct decision in those cases. If both are true, then the optimized way of living would be to use heuristics where they don't get you in trouble, and use rational examination when the result would be counterintuitive. Here's where I'm stuck - how do you recognize ahead of time when you should ignore your instinct/heuristic/cognitive-bias, and instead use the more exhaustive rational examination? It's as if we need to develop an intuitive skill on when to recognize that a reality is likely to be counterintuitive. "Oh, my gut tells me that this is one of those cases where my gut will be wrong." Which seems a bit contradictory.

twoodfin 13y ago
The stakes in your decision? If doing a full rational analysis has a cost in time and effort, but leads to a more accurate result on average, there's a level of risk/reward at which it's worth applying and one where it's not. Of course, identifying the crossover point would seem to require a second-order heuristic...
Amadou 13y ago
I think the name for that skill is "wisdom." You only really get that sort of insight from experience.
StavrosK 13y ago
It does seem contradictory, but it's not. You definitely learn to recognize your biases, it's a skill. There have been many times when I've caught myself thinking something, only to then say "wait a minute, I've just fallen victim to bias X" and then reversed my decision or opinion. I'm not great at it, but I'm very happy that it catches at least some of my brain's bugs.
13y ago

beefman 13y ago

Define "rational". Psychologists like Kahneman often say they're using some agreed-upon definition that exists outside their field. But applications of Bernoulli and Bayes are an area of ongoing research, even narrowly [1][2]. More generally, no theory of general intelligence exists, and to assume you can trick intelligent agents like humans with simplistic experiments is unconvincing IMO. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proebsting%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proebsting%27s_paradox [2] http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/statistical_physics_attacks_st_petersburg_paradox_resolved-96549 http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/statistical_physi...

adambratt 13y ago

Fellow readers, what's the best book you've read for improving your critical thinking/rationality?

alok-g 13y ago
This may be overwhelming but can help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases While I am not there yet myself with most of the biases, it seems that memorizing the name of a bias once you understand it helps you spot it more often in the daily life. [Sorry I do not know which cognitive bias would that be! :-)]
- adambratt 13y ago
  Yeah, I wish I could find a good tool/site for quizzing myself on these. Something that would give me a paragraph and ask me to name the bias present if any.
  - alok-g 13y ago
    That would be nice indeed. Let me also know if you find something! :-) Thanks.
  - denzil 13y ago
    Anki has some decks like that: http://ankisrs.net/ http://ankisrs.net/
    - alok-g 13y ago
      Can you please point to the decks? I see only the software on that URL.
MaysonL 13y ago
The user Illusion The Commanding Self Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

dakimov 13y ago

I can measure how rational you really are. The result is around zero. Seriously, come on, people are not rationally thinking creatures at all, nobody is. There is nothing to even measure. If everybody became rational, the world would collapse instantly. Do you realize how many people would cease their socially indispensable work if they acted perfectly rational from an individual (meaning egotistical) perspective? I clearly see that I am irrational, but I cannot stop being so. I estimate that in order to become rationally thinking, I would have to undergo an unbearably painful transformation of my entire mental entity. My mind just works that way, it is hardwired irrationally, as any other human's mind. The article and the attempt itself are great though.

markdown 13y ago
> Do you realize how many people would cease their socially indispensable work if they acted perfectly rational from an individual (meaning egotistical) perspective? It is often in the interest of individuals to contribute to the group.

jdpage 13y ago

Depending on how rigorously the research on this is done, this is a test I might actually take, especially since, as he says in the article, a lot of it is stuff you can improve if you find yourself lacking. On the other hand, I don't want to take an IQ test. This is because you end up with a number which can now be used to place you on a scale relative to others, which as far as I'm concerned is fairly useless[1]. I'd much rather be judged based on what I've done rather on some number that purports to measure my potential. [1] In my (fairly limited, I grant) experience, IQ scores are mostly used by insecure navel-gazers as a sort of bragging right.

MikeCapone 13y ago

Most here are probably already aware of it, but for those who have somehow managed not to find this treasure trove: A great place to study the art of human rationality is LessWrong.com. The 'sequences' are the place to start: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

krichman 13y ago
I have a hard time reading Yudkowsky. I'm not as in love with his writing as he is. I think he makes good points. But if you're starting from the position of evidence-based beliefs and Bayesian reasoning, the knowledge gained by suffering through a longwinded essay seems too little. I have tried a few times, because others seem to love Less Wrong, but each time I found I came away with little or no new information.
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  1) No writer can please everybody, so it's fine if he's not your style. 2) Have you read only a few things that he wrote about, for example, the better known cognitive biases and such, or have you also read some of the more advanced sequences? Because if you're reading the advanced essays and feel you already know all that stuff, you are a very rare breed -- good for you! I hope you're working on some hard problem in an un-sexy field and not building another photo-sharing app :) To quote Dr. Aubrey de Grey: >It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later. 3) When someone says they don't like something that I like, I ask them what is it that they like. I figure maybe they've found something even better and I'd love to get my hands on it too, and it's also a good way to see if they're just signalling superiority by disliking things that many others like. So what would you recommend I read to learn more about human rationality? Anything other than the usual suspects (Jayne, Kahneman, Tversky, Schelling, Hatie & Dawes, etc)? Thanks.
  - krichman 13y ago

D9u 13y ago

The irony that a site which uses the word "ethics" in its title would host such unethical content. The bit about Bush should have been omitted. But, that may just be my irrationality.

stiff 13y ago

The notion of domain-independent rationality is the favourite way for some nerds (so called "sceptics") to pump up their egos and then throw around nonsensical judgements in domains they don't know the first thing about. But hey, they know the Bayes theorem! So they will out-smart everyone on every topic! In some sense this is an intellectual philosophers stone, the notion (it is never said out loud but that is what seems to happen subconsciously) that once you are "rational" enough you can judge things more effectively without having expertise in a given field, medicine for example. A good example is Nassim Taleb's last book, a collection of completely ridiculous opinions on biology, medicine, computing and fitness...