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saturn comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Yes, improving your individual rationality won't necessarily allow you to duplicate the success of the luckiest individuals selected from a pool of billions of irrational people, but I don't see how this fact implies that individual rationality is useless.
If rationality was the most important component of individual level success- the Ultimate Power- then you'd expect pretty much all the most successful people to have above-average rationality. Heck, even if it wasn't, you'd still expect pretty much all the most successful people to have above-average rationality. Nobody would claim that height is the most important thing in playing basketball, but pretty much all the most successful basketball players have above average height.
Actually, a lot of people would claim that height is the most important thing in playing basketball. Average NBA players are 78.9 inches tall. Height is roughly normally distributed, this puts them at about 3 SD above mean height. They surely aren't typically 3 SD above the mean in any trait that doesn't correlate strongly with height, and height is less environmentally influenced (and simply simpler) than the traits it correlates with so its reasonable to assume that it is more causal of other extreme traits than the reverse.
How many highly rational people do you suppose there are in the world? How many of them do you suspect are risk-seeking enough to aim for the type of swing-for-the-fences success that would make them notable?
If your respective answers aren't "quite a lot" and "a significant fraction" then it seems like you're neglecting the base rate. Otherwise, I'd like to know how you arrived at those estimates.
"How many highly rational people do you suppose there are in the world? How many of them do you suspect are risk-seeking enough to aim for the type of swing-for-the-fences success that would make them notable?"
Precisely half of the human population has above average rationality. What's notable about people like the Nazis is not that they weren't x-rationalists, it's that they were well below average.
Average general rationality is probably a lot less than you'd think. Domain-specific rationality is what determines the success in any particular endeavor, and rather than generating full theory of rationality, simple heuristics and lots of attemptees most likely approximate it well enough and thus produce steady amount of really succesful people.
Luck should cancel out in a large population. Given the 100 most-successful people in history, is rationality the trait at which they most commonly excelled?
EDIT: Luck shouldn't cancel out, but be selected for. What I meant was, the most-lucky people were probably lucky with different skill sets, so that we should still be able to identify skills contributing towards success. If you saw that 5 of the 10 most-successful people were manipulative sociopaths, you shouldn't attribute it to luck.
No. Given the most successful people in history you would expect them to be far more attracted to risk taking than would be rational. Selecting the 100 most successful doesn't cancel out luck and the larger the population the more you can be sure that the 100 chosen are non representative.
To select 10,000 people randomly and compare success and rationality.
Right; what I meant was that if you see a particular skill crop up repeatedly, you shouldn't attribute that to luck.
I have no freakin idea who the most successful 100 people in history were. I'd tend to guess that I have never heard of any of them.
Then you must not be measuring success by absolute wealth. How are you measuring it?
Even if you want to measure success by money, absolute wealth is not a good measure because of inheritance. Four of the 10 richest americans are survivors of Sam Walton.
Accomplishing their goals of course. Why on Earth would you use absolute wealth?
Anyway, you can't translate well between different times and situations.
Finally, really large amounts of wealth aren't even well defined, partly because large assets aren't liquid and partly because the largest assets are frequently unofficial political power.
I was not recommending that.
If two agents have different goals, I don't see how to say which has accomplished its goal "more" than the other.