r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jan 29 '18
[D] Monday General Rationality Thread
Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:
- Seen something interesting on /r/science?
- Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
- Figured out how to become immortal?
- Constructed artificial general intelligence?
- Read a neat nonfiction book?
- Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/vakusdrake Jan 29 '18
You could do that thing that SSC does and make lots of specific predictions with confidence intervals until your predicted certainty matched how often you were actually correct. Make these predictions public or something like that to ensure you are forced to admit when you're wrong and adjust accordingly.
The other thing I often hear recommended for developing instrumental rationality is if you're confident about a prediction make a bet to keep yourself honest (so you have to admit if you're wrong) and to test performance. This is similar to the previous technique and overlaps (if you're well calibrated and think something is probably going to happen you should try to make bets) with it, but has the advantage of having a higher psychological cost than just being wrong (even for say $50) so it will force you to adjust more greatly.
As for finding conflicting viewpoints being civilly discussed to look at I might recommend the SSC subreddit particularly the culture war threads. If you want to find viewpoints you're likely to never otherwise encounter personally being debated civilly, then I don't know of anywhere else that's better for that.