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Mass_Driver comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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I'm trying to figure out whether you're unimpressed with the legislator for (a) making useless speeches, or (b) making speeches that might have been useful but didn't succeed on this particular occasion.
Hm, it seems I wasn't clear. The thousand speeches in my example would occur over a full career in politics, so that it should have become evident to the legislator that her speeches were not having much effect, and so that we can reasonably conclude that a rational person would not have expected a typical speech on her part to have the desired effect.
I give credit for a correct effort that happens to fail. With perfect foreknowledge, I guess you could only bother fighting where you will in fact prevail. Since it's your hypothetical, I'll give you a pass.
Reality doesn't.
Well, sure; I would give credit for that too. However, if you routinely and repeatedly fail to achieve your stated goal over a long period of time, it constitutes very strong evidence that your customary activity does not achieve your goal. If you believe that you are simply the victim of bad luck or something like that, you should have equally strong evidence to support the belief. In the absence of such evidence, you should change your method or change your goal.
Obviously we will all fail sometimes; we don't have perfect foreknowledge and so the occasional or even frequent lost fight is totally acceptable. But when almost all you do is lose, it is irrational to believe that the effort you are putting in is "correct."
I agree. But on the other hand, you have people who change their investment strategy every time it "doesn't work" and on average do worse than e.g. anyone who holds fast in some non-ripoff index funds.
It would be nice to know which way I tend to err. I don't feel a need to deny my mistakes for psychological benefit, because I can just admit that I didn't try very hard to make the perfect decision at the time (bounded rationality). I'm always interested in improving my heuristics, but I don't want to spend too much time trying to optimize them, either.