7.5 KiB
[BST] "Raising the sanity waterline" through fiction.
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Author: u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3v9hl0/bst_raising_the_sanity_waterline_through_fiction/
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Score: 14
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Created: 2015-12-03T09:44:20
Post:
We have some pretty great writers here, and I've hear many complaints about both HPMOR and lesswrong. Not that I'm suggesting we necessarily try to do what they're doing, but better, I'm just spitballing on the general topic.
I'm not one of those great writers, I find that the more I focus on communication the less I'm able to focus on code and vise-versa. Mostly because of context switching.
Anyway, I'd like to at least talk about what such a project could look like, starting with our goals and approaches. I think the two are closely enough related that they should be discussed as one.
So, without further ado, how could we "raise the sanity waterline" through fiction?
Recruit entirely new people to the cause?
Raise the sanity waterline to a small level in groups that are far from us?
Do meta-community management, further solidifying lesswrong-style rationality as a subculture?
Write a self-help book for muggles?
Other approaches?
Those are a few off the top of my head. You should probably think about what we could be doing at least a bit before reading the comments and their justification too in depth. Some of the ones I've suggested I believe are obviously a poor choice.
Comments:
u/None [+19] (17 hours later)
I think HPMoR actually started out very well. I really loved the bit about McGonnagal levitating Professor Verres as an experimental test of the existence of magic.
Now, the thing about the sanity waterline is that it's a waterline: a baseline that we want the supermajority of the population to actually reach. Where LWian "propagandizing" tends to go wrong is in targeting people who've already heard of what LW calls "Traditional Rationality" and just targeting the subcultures existing LWians happen to belong to: we wind up with a community that has a lot of overlap with the Bay Area tech industry, substantial overlap with the postgraduate in mathy subjects crowd, and substantial overlap with the took a degree in philosophy crowd. There is then an attempt to teach these people "advanced"-level rationality skills, like handling cognitive biases or using made-up statistics instead of intuitions, which are worse than made-up statistics.
Problem is, the current sanity waterline is substantially below the level necessary for those lessons to work in the first place. The sanity waterline is just about at the level where "check the existence of magic through an experimental test rather than breaking your family apart with a holy war" is an interesting, useful, novel idea.
For most people, "reality" is still socially-mediated and socially accessed. I don't mean that in a postmodern way; I mean that they simply cannot check most of their beliefs for themselves in any way. Consider how you would test a claim about electric voltage, or lift, when you lack both training and lab equipment! As such, their concepts of sanity and rationality involve determining whom to listen to and how to "defend themselves" from malicious memes.
Which brings us to the issue of fiction. Raising the sanity waterline through fiction is... actually pretty hard, because in fiction, it's almost always easier for main characters to directly access reality for themselves than it is for real people (part of what makes fiction so much more fun than reality). Tiffany Aching can just pick up an iron skillet and go whack Jenny Greenteeth over the head to determine the existence of alternate-dimensional reality-parasitizing fairies; I need a nontrivial experimental setup to verify Newton's Law of Gravity at a high-school level.
Sooooo... whatever happened to books like "101 Science Experiments for Kids"? Maybe a more adult version of that would be helpful? I mean, if you're thinking in terms of ultimately presenting statistical reasoning down the line, it's a lot easier to formalize and conduct proper statistics when you're not including "I'm being lied to" in every hypothesis class, which is a lot easier when you've got your own experimental apparatus (or other access to underlying reality) instead of talking about which authority figures to trust or reciting lists of logical fallacies.
u/Transfuturist [+6] Carthago delenda est. (18 hours later)
I need a nontrivial experimental setup to verify Newton's Law of Gravity at a high-school level
It was amusing to try to even approach the value of 1g from our experimental setups. It never worked.
when you're not including "I'm being lied to" in every hypothesis
instead of talking about which authority figures to trust
Rationalist detectives go!
using made-up statistics instead of intuitions, which are worse than made-up statistics
I haven't internalized this lesson very well, probably because I haven't encountered it very frequently. It's the actual relation of the result to the premises that surprises your intuitions, not the exact result from precisely correct premises. If the relation is continuous and has low partial derivatives, you can rely on the result being only somewhat less accurate than your assumptions.
u/DocFuture [+6] (22 hours later)
Some of the themes I've used in the Doc Future stories: What sorts of mistakes do people make despite being smart and rational, how do you balance rationality with emotions and moral judgement, and the dangers inherent in tearing down Chesterton's fence--even if it seems like a good idea at the time.
These are all interesting and entertaining in their own right, which means people are more likely to internalize them than parables or lectures.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (2 days later)
Chesterton's Fence? I'm unfamiliar with the phrase, and I'm saving part three for when I have time to savor it :)
u/DocFuture [+4] (2 days later)
A paraphrase of something G. K. Chesterton said is "Fences aren't accidental. Don't tear one down unless you know why it was put up."
I'm more inclined to say you don't necessarily need to know all the reasons why it was originally put up if it was generations ago, but you should try to find out everything it's doing (or preventing) now.
An example that gets people all the time is removing or altering something that mitigates damage during rare floods.
u/imuli [+2] Seeker (a day later)
Along the lines of the literal title: write rational fiction based in the here and now with more or less ordinary people and goals.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (3 days later)
A crime drama would be nice. Maybe have the rational protagonist be a private investigator and single parent trying to pay off her college loans, or something.
u/IllusoryIntelligence [+1] (10 days later)
Rational Veronica Mars?
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (12 days later)
Maybe, or it could be a completely new character. The idea of a private investigator and single parent trying to pay off her college loans seems normal and relatable enough that it probably doesn't have to be unique to Veronica Mars.