Vladimir_Golovin comments on A Sense That More Is Possible - Less Wrong

61 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 March 2009 01:15AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 13 March 2009 01:52:38PM *  7 points [-]

Shouldn't a common-sense 'success at life' (money, status, free time, whatever) be the real metric of success at rationality? Shouldn't a rationalist, as a General Inteligence, succeed over a non-rationalist in any chosen orderly environment, according to any chosen metric of success -- including common metrics of that environment?

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 13 March 2009 09:38:36PM 11 points [-]

No.

  • If "general intelligence" is a binary classification, almost everyone is one. If it's continuous, rationalist and non-rationalist humans are indistinguishable next to AIXI.
  • You don't know what the rationalist is optimizing for. Rationalists may even be less likely to value common-sense success metrics.
  • Even if those are someone's goals, growth in rationality involves tradeoffs - investment of time, if nothing else - in the short term, but that may still be a long time.
  • Heck, if "rationality" is defined as anything other than "winning", it might just not win for common-sense goals in some realistic environments.
  • People with the disposition to become rationalists may tend to also not be as naturally good at some things, like gaining status.
Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 14 March 2009 06:49:56PM *  5 points [-]

Point-by-point:

  1. Agreed. Let's throw away the phrase about General Intelligence -- it's not needed there.

  2. Obviously, if we're measuring one's reality-steering performance we must know the target region (and perhaps some other parameters like planned time expenditure etc.) in advance.

  3. The measurement should measure the performance of a rationalist at his/her current level, not taking into account time and resources he/she spent to level up. Measuring 'the speed or efficiency of leveling-up in rationality' is a different measurement.

  4. The definitions at the beginning of the original post will do.

  5. On one hand, the reality-mapping and reality-steering abilities should work for any activity, no matter whether the performer is hardware-accelerated for that activity or not. On the other hand, we should somehow take this into account -- after all, excelling at things one is not hardware-accelerated for is a good indicator. (If only we could reliably determine who is hardware-accelerated for what).

(Edit: cool, it does numeric lists automatically!)

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