Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real?, published by Jacob Falkovich on the LessWrong.
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.
Basketballism
Imagine that tomorrow everyone on the planet forgets the concept of training basketball skill.
The next day everyone is as good at basketball as they were the previous day, but this talent is assumed to be fixed. No one expects their performance to change over time. No one teaches basketball, although many people continue to play the game for fun.
Geneticists explain that some people are born with better hand-eye coordination and are able to shoot a basketball accurately. Economists explain that highly-paid NBA players have a stronger incentive to hit shots, which explains their improved performance. Psychologists note that people who take more jump shots each day hit a higher percentage and theorize a principal factor of basketball affinity that influences both desire and skill at basketball. Critical race theorists claim that white men’s under-representation in the NBA is due to systemic oppression.
Papers are published, tenure is awarded.
New scientific disciplines emerge and begin studying basketball more systematically. Evolutionary physiologists point out that our ancestors threw stones in a sidearm motion, which explains our lack of adaptation to the different motion of jump shots. Behavioral kinesiologists describe systematic biases in human basketball, such as the tendency to shoot balls with a flatter trajectory and a lower release point than is optimal.
When asked by aspiring basketball players if jump shots can be improved, they all shake their heads and rue that it is human nature to miss shots. A Nobel laureate behavioral kinesiologist tells audiences that even after writing books on biases in basketball his shot did not improve much. Someone publishes a study showing that basketball performance improves after a one-hour training session with schoolchildren, but Shott Ballexander writes a critical takedown pointing out that the effect wore off after a month and could simply be random noise. The field switches to studying “nudges”: ways to design systems so that players hit more shots at the same level of skill. They recommend that the NBA adopt larger hoops.
Papers are published, tenure is awarded.
Then, one day, someone merely looking to get good at basketball, as opposed to getting tenure, comes across these papers. She realizes that the lessons of behavioral kinesiology can be used to improve her jump shot. She practices releasing the ball at the top of her jump from above the forehead with a steep arc. As her shots start swooshing in more people gather at the gym to practice with her. They call themselves Basketballists.
Most people who walk past the gym sneer at the Basketballists. “You call yourselves Basketballists and yet none of you shoot 100%”, they taunt. “You should go to grad school if you want to learn about jump shots.” Some of Basketballists themselves begin to doubt the project, especially since switching to the new shooting techniques lowers their performance at first. “Did you hear what the Center for Applied Basketball is charging for a training camp?”, they mutter, “I bet their results are all due to selection bias.”
The Basketballists insist that the training does help, that they really get better by the day. Their shots hit at a slightly higher rate than before, although this is swamped by the inter-individual variance. How could they know if it works?
AsWrongAsEver
A core axiom of Rationality (capitalized to refer to LessWrong version) is that it is a skill that can be improved with time and practice. The names Overcoming Bias and LessWrong reflect this: rationality is a direction, not a fixed point.
What would it mean to "improve at Rationality"? On the epistemic side, to draw a map that more accurat...
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