Full post is called “Prioritization Research for Advancing Wisdom and Intelligence”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bNffQPeev2peoDWg5/prioritization-research-for-advancing-wisdom-and
First two paragraphs (after the summary):
For those interested in increasing humanity’s long-term wisdom and intelligence[1], several types of wildly different interventions are options on the table. For example, we could improve at teaching rationality, or we could make progress on online education. We could make forecasting systems and data platforms. We might even consider something more radical, like brain-computer interfaces or highly advanced pre-AGI AI systems.
These interventions share many of the same benefits. If we figure out ways to remove people’s cognitive biases, causing them to make better political decisions, that would be similar to the impact of forecasting systems on their political decisions. It seems natural to attempt to figure out how to compare these. We wouldn’t want to invest a lot of resources into one field, to realize 10 years later that we could have spent them better in another. This prioritization is pressing because Effective Altruists are currently scaling up work in several relevant areas (rationality, forecasting, institutional decision making) but mostly ignoring others (brain-computer interfaces, fundamental internet improvements).
Basic idea of improving institutional decision-making seems fine. But why do they always have to take it in the weird, rationalist, “I must remove all of my cognitive biases” direction?
What made this post sneerworthy to me was this diagram:
Imagine thinking siskind’s blog is important. Couldn’t be me.
Admittedly the full “list of potential interventions” later in the post is less shockingly out of touch.
Those nerds only want high INT and WIS and make everything else a dump stat.
When i think advancing long term human wisdom, I think Slate Star Codex
Specifically the post where he goes aroind insisting to everyone at his hospital that he isnt hitler. That one a going to age as a fine wine expandimg human intellecy.
Every time this comes up the answer is “make an education app” or “genetically modify babies.” The main reason is that that’s what people who identify as rationalists want to do that already.
There are a ton of well researched actual ways to increase a population’s IQ. Those are fixing environmental justice issues like chemical plumes and lead pipes, reducing child poverty, and implementing universal pre K. These never come up, because rationalists don’t want to use a backhoe, run a food drive, or teach three year olds.
uh, because it’s a total sham for pursuing right wing ideology?
This kind of thing sounds interesting to me until I remember how they define “intelligence”.
Wait, ‘better political decisions’ so they are back at saying there is a right and a wrong political decision? How very object level, bad Rationalist, no cookie (as this Rationalist didn’t agree with the GDPR).
I’m going to be 100% completely honest here. I clicked your link looking for #7. It doesn’t exist. I’ve been bamboozled by SneerClub.
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Seems pretty weird to talk about “increasing humanity’s long-term wisdom and intelligence” and “potential interventions” without any mention of our current educational systems. Surely things like universal public education have done more for increasing intelligence than any random rationalist blog???!?
I know “fund universal pre-K” or “offer free lunches at all schools” isn’t as sexy as “figure out new AI that will make everyone geniuses”, but you’d think that such “rational” people would at least be somewhat aware of these known methods for improving people’s education and knowledge…