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PhilGoetz comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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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.