Comment on The Apologist and the Revolutionary

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:17:53 GMT

Haig, there's a difference between:

(1) Updating your beliefs and action-patterns as new evidence comes in; deciding to earn money by the method that is actually most likely to be effective (according to the best evidence you know) instead of by your last year's guess as to how to most effectively earn money, for example.

and

(2) Having your beliefs and action-patterns be in a constant or immobilizing state of flux.

If you're a good rationalist, and you carefully research topics that matter for your goals, after a while you should in most cases have a fairly stable probability distribution as to what the world is like and how best to achieve your goals. (If you find your model flops first one way, and then another, and then another... your models are overconfident and are based too much on recent data, so you should replace them with a more spread-out probability distribution over how things might be.) This way, you get a stable model you can use to e.g. actually earn more money, and not just go through motions that you at one point thought would earn you more money.

I've been listening to high-quality entrepreneurship seminars as I exercise (audiobooks are a great way to get free bonus time), and many of them recommend rationality techniques like making your hypotheses explicit and actively searching for dis-confirming evidence. These are seminars made by and for stereotypical go-getters.

Discuss