Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"

x This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality" — LessWrong Best of LessWrong 2022 Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) Postmortems & Retrospectives Rationality Community Personal Blog 274

 Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality" 

 by AnnaSalamon 9th Jun 2022 20 min read 81 274

 Hi!  I was writing this originally as a comment-reply to this thread , but my reply is long, so I am factoring it out into its own post for easier reading/critique. 

 This is more comment-reply-quality than blog post quality, so read at your own risk.  I do think the topic is interesting.

  

 Short version of my thesis: It seems to me that CFAR got less far with "make a real art of rationality, that helps people actually make progress on tricky issues such as AI risk" than one might have hoped.  My lead guess is that the barriers and tricky spots we ran into are somewhat similar to those that lots of efforts at self-help / human potential movement / etc. things have run into, and are basically "it's easy and locally reinforcing to follow gradients toward what one might call 'guessing the student's password', and much harder and much less locally reinforcing to reason/test/whatever one's way toward a real art of rationality. Also, the process of following these gradients tends to corrupt one's ability to reason/care/build real stuff, as does assimilation into many parts of wider society."  

 Epistemic status: “personal guesswork”.  In some sense, ~every sentence in the post deserves repeated hedge-wording and caveats; but I’m skipping most of those hedges in an effort to make my hypotheses clear and readable, so please note that everything below this is guesswork and might be wrong.  I am sharing only my own personal opinions here; others from past or current CFAR, or elsewhere, have other views. 

  

 Conversational context, leading up to this post-length comment-reply:

 I wrote: 

 In terms of whether there is some interesting thing we [at CFAR] discovered that caused us to abandon e.g. the mainline [workshops, that we at CFAR used to run]: I can't speak for more than myself here either.  But for my own take, I think we ran to some extent into the same problem that something-like-every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60's or so has run into, which e.g. the documentary (read: 4-hour somewhat intense propaganda film) Century of the Self is a pretty good introduction to.  I separately or also think the old mainline workshops provided a pretty good amount of real value to a lot of people, both directly (via the way folks encountered the workshop) and via networks (by introducing a bunch of people to each other who then hit it o

... (truncated, 92 KB total)