>>6144
I don't really think the question of 'good or bad for Less Wrong' is what we should be asking, but thank you for asking it.
What do we get from using slogans, where do they go wrong, and what would an alternative even look like?
They are very good at aligning your thinking once you remember them. Often times we fall into precisely the failure mode they are warning against. They directly connect our behavior to ways of if not solving, at least identifying problems in the first place. That is why we use them. We see a cached problem with a solution ready that can immediately link that to an explanation of said solution.
For example we fixed dictionary arguments because we know to 'taboo your words.' There is an easy to identify problem, and a clear action to take.
The bad parts are:
* non-rationalists see it as cultish
* new members have to learn a huge number of phrases
* hard to keep track of them all to even see in the moment where you done fucked up
Before we think of something better, how can we improve our use of slogans?
Look for ways people still make those errors and figure out how we could better improve their identification abilities, or strategies of dealing with the errors. Identification is largely pattern matching, so you can train people directly for that. Strategies require testing, but just slap on some A/B testing and strap some rationalists to torture devices and we'll get ideas real quick. Maybe actually do some psychological research on the side.
To find more errors to fix with slogans, watch for people going wrong and look at the sequence of events that lead them to where they are. Figure out where they went wrong and what they should have done instead. Apply psychology, game theory and shit to figure out why they didn't do that.
What would something even better look like?
To fill the same niche as a slogan it would need to easily connect problem situations to solutions and explanations. Additionally we'd want to have that without the cultishness and difficulties of remembering them in the moment or huge bank of terms to look up.
Alternatives that come to mind are mentors correcting mistakes as in a dojo, or everyone learning to identify mistakes in their own mind.
The problem with the latter is that even if it worked no one would be able to easily reference the explanations, and even if they could produce an explanation for what they were doing it wouldn't necessarily be the best for teaching others.
The former would be perhaps more directly and immediately useful. The teacher would have the long form reason for why it works and why they chose that version for instruction. Not everyone needs to know why everything works. You just need enough rationality to correct and improve upon the mistakes that you make. This is the sort of thing you see in situations of teaching non-rationalists: this is already in place in academia. You don't need to know why they chose that method, they're just trying to teach you physics with it.
I would expect a similar thing with rationality.
We can even get the best of figuring stuff out on your own here too. You don't need to know necessarily about the sunk cost fallacy if I can get you to internalize game theory. You'll recognize that it doesn't make sense to take an action based on past losses. We never need to invent a slogan for crying abandoned sunk costs, and we also get the benefits of having the right and proper explanations written up somewhere else.
The students of rationality can focus exclusively on the critical thinking aspect without getting caught up in the cultishness and jumble of phrases, and because they identified or solved a problem on their own they'll be far more prepared to identify and fix that problem in the future.
We'll probably need to give them the label for what is happening so they can properly discuss it, but that's different from a slogan. This also effectively allows us to integrate with academic terminology. You're given a problem, you identify and solve the problem in a couple different ways, you're given the word for the problem.
Our current way of doing things? Totally not a cult.
