I agree that LW has been a big part of keeping EA epistemically strong, but I think most of that is selection rather than education. It’s not that reading LW makes you much more clearer-thinking or focused on truth, it’s that only people who are that way to begin with decide to read LW, and they then get channeled to EA.
If that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily discredit rationality as an EA cause area, it just changes the mechanism and the focus: maybe the goal shouldn’t be making everybody LW-rational, it should be finding the people that already fit the mold, hopefully teaching them some LW-rationality, and then channeling them to EA.
I agree that LW has been a big part of keeping EA epistemically strong, but I think most of that is selection rather than education. It’s not that reading LW makes you much more clearer-thinking or focused on truth, it’s that only people who are that way to begin with decide to read LW, and they then get channeled to EA.
If that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily discredit rationality as an EA cause area, it just changes the mechanism and the focus: maybe the goal shouldn’t be making everybody LW-rational, it should be finding the people that already fit the mold, hopefully teaching them some LW-rationality, and then channeling them to EA.