Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And it’s easier to write. And I should probably do it more often. And you should give me a stern look and be like — “Eliezer, write that more often.” Done. Eliezer, please. I think 13 or 14 years ago you wrote an essay called Rationality is Systematized Winning. Would you have expected then that 14 years down the line, the most successful people in the world or some of the most successful people in the world would have been rationalist? Only if the whole rationalist business had worked closer to the upper 10% of my expectations than it actually got into. The title of the essay was not “Rationalists are Systematized Winning”. There wasn’t even a rationality community back then. Rationality is not a creed. It is not a banner. It is not a way of life. It is not a personal choice. It is not a social group. It’s not really human. It’s a structure of a cognitive process. And you can try to get a little bit more of it into you. And if you want to do that and you fail, then having wanted to do it doesn’t make any difference except insofar as you succeeded. Hanging out with other people who share that creed, going to their parties. It only ever matters insofar as you get a bit more of that structure into you. And this is apparently hard.…

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