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

13 Post author: alyssavance 23 December 2009 10:49AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 December 2009 12:32:52AM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 December 2009 03:31:33AM 2 points [-]

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?

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.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 December 2009 05:30:15PM 0 points [-]

Right; what I meant was that if you see a particular skill crop up repeatedly, you shouldn't attribute that to luck.