said (1y ago #402 ), referenced by >>445 >>966:
The martial art of ideology
The best idea on Lesswrong was the martial art of rationality. It didn't deliver.
Imagine you travel for days to a monastery. The monks test and accept you. You learn, drill, and spar the most important art: the art of thought. It is the art of discerning truth, noticing the limits of your own knowledge, getting to the bottom of things, clarifying your strategies, not being deceived, and generally being superhumanly sane and wise. The art of using your wits. When you leave four years later, you might as well have superpowers. Sign me up.
This is plausible. In most fields amateurs get rolled by masters, and it takes years of training to get there. In Jiu Jitsu, strong amateurs get crushed by guys with even six months of training. They in turn get crushed by the first belt, and so on up to the master level. Master engineers or programmers can run circles around their younger and less experienced selves. Why should the art of thought be any different?
There is a great deal I have learned about how to think well. My younger self was sometimes retarded, and I surpass him in many ways. I meet even highly intelligent people that I can run circles around in areas crucial to their plans because they just don't think clearly in that area. I see others much stronger than me, often because they have training I don't. There must be something of an art.
How much of this is just brains plus expertise? As far as we can tell, intelligence as such is genetically fixed. If you run a strong mind through the right training, you get an expert. Impressive, but is there really a specific expertise of using intelligence, such that one can learn more and faster, and come to higher quality ideas? If one learns X before Y, is there some specific X such that all Y get a noticeable boost?
"Education" traditionally understood is almost directly on target. Let's look at the meta-content of a good education: you learn epistemology both practical and theoretical. You learn how to do and recognize good science. You learn how to do research. You learn how to argue and prove logically. You learn how to persuade well and how to only be persuaded by truthful rhetoric. You learn about the canon of great classic books and philosophers. You learn that apprenticeship and experience are often the best sources of knowledge. You learn a willingness to think, and your own limits.
This sounds a lot like the art of rationality. No wonder LW didn't find it; they were allergic to the point of disability of anything conventional, traditional, high class, and obvious. Oops.
But "rationality" is a bad word for this and "education" no longer does it. What I notice is that much of it comes down to ideology. How you think, what thought is legitimate, who you read, and so on are ideological questions. You want to be able to think well, but you're utterly lost if you haven't got a good and trustworthy ideology to think within. And indeed, the failure of lesswrong was specifically ideological.
What we're looking for is the martial art of ideology.
Aspiring rationalists lamented the lack of an adversarial sparring context in which to test their art. We have no such problem: the martial art of ideology calls for an ideological thunderdome. Internet forums have served this purpose for many of us. We got the better part of our educations on forums, and we got them good and hard. There's nothing like arguing with the best to sharpen your art and worldview.
But the rationalists were also wrong in a bigger way about the lack of adversariality. Alex Jones will set you straight: "There is a war for your mind. A war to make you docile. A war to make you a sheep. A war to take away your initiative, your freedom, and your control over your own life."
He's often a kook, but he nails it there. By default, you're enslaved to someone else's marketing or political bullshit. To have any real agency at all, you need to get good at the martial art of ideology. To succeed at the highest levels of true life, you need to be a master.
Imagine you travel for days to a monastery. The monks test and accept you. You learn, drill, and spar the most important art: the art of thought. It is the art of discerning truth, noticing the limits of your own knowledge, getting to the bottom of things, clarifying your strategies, not being deceived, and generally being superhumanly sane and wise. The art of using your wits. When you leave four years later, you might as well have superpowers. Sign me up.
This is plausible. In most fields amateurs get rolled by masters, and it takes years of training to get there. In Jiu Jitsu, strong amateurs get crushed by guys with even six months of training. They in turn get crushed by the first belt, and so on up to the master level. Master engineers or programmers can run circles around their younger and less experienced selves. Why should the art of thought be any different?
There is a great deal I have learned about how to think well. My younger self was sometimes retarded, and I surpass him in many ways. I meet even highly intelligent people that I can run circles around in areas crucial to their plans because they just don't think clearly in that area. I see others much stronger than me, often because they have training I don't. There must be something of an art.
How much of this is just brains plus expertise? As far as we can tell, intelligence as such is genetically fixed. If you run a strong mind through the right training, you get an expert. Impressive, but is there really a specific expertise of using intelligence, such that one can learn more and faster, and come to higher quality ideas? If one learns X before Y, is there some specific X such that all Y get a noticeable boost?
"Education" traditionally understood is almost directly on target. Let's look at the meta-content of a good education: you learn epistemology both practical and theoretical. You learn how to do and recognize good science. You learn how to do research. You learn how to argue and prove logically. You learn how to persuade well and how to only be persuaded by truthful rhetoric. You learn about the canon of great classic books and philosophers. You learn that apprenticeship and experience are often the best sources of knowledge. You learn a willingness to think, and your own limits.
This sounds a lot like the art of rationality. No wonder LW didn't find it; they were allergic to the point of disability of anything conventional, traditional, high class, and obvious. Oops.
But "rationality" is a bad word for this and "education" no longer does it. What I notice is that much of it comes down to ideology. How you think, what thought is legitimate, who you read, and so on are ideological questions. You want to be able to think well, but you're utterly lost if you haven't got a good and trustworthy ideology to think within. And indeed, the failure of lesswrong was specifically ideological.
What we're looking for is the martial art of ideology.
Aspiring rationalists lamented the lack of an adversarial sparring context in which to test their art. We have no such problem: the martial art of ideology calls for an ideological thunderdome. Internet forums have served this purpose for many of us. We got the better part of our educations on forums, and we got them good and hard. There's nothing like arguing with the best to sharpen your art and worldview.
But the rationalists were also wrong in a bigger way about the lack of adversariality. Alex Jones will set you straight: "There is a war for your mind. A war to make you docile. A war to make you a sheep. A war to take away your initiative, your freedom, and your control over your own life."
He's often a kook, but he nails it there. By default, you're enslaved to someone else's marketing or political bullshit. To have any real agency at all, you need to get good at the martial art of ideology. To succeed at the highest levels of true life, you need to be a master.