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On this subject, a hypothesis (I didn’t do the science yet!) that I favor is that one should look at people who are successful in several very different subjects, rather than just one.
Even if a subject is intellectual, like chess or even, say, physics, someone may be successful at it because of “local optimization”; it’s useful to look at them to figure out how to do good at that subject, but not necessarily in general. Given the constraints of a human life, however, it’s very hard to become an expert (i.e. specialize) in more than one or two unrelated subjects. This suggests that being successful in several is evidence of having good general skills (presumably rational ones when the subject is intellectual), rather than specialized ones.
Another point: computers are really good at chess, but it doesn’t seem that looking at chess programs is a good way to learn rationality. Thus, looking at people that do chess well is also not likely to be a good way to learn rationality.
It looks to me like chess is an excellent way to learn a rare and important part of rationality, but becoming a chess grandmaster is a terribly irrational life decision for almost everyone due to the intense competition and low rewards. Also, at world champion levels, many skills, especially intellectual skills, probably rely on biological abnormalities which correlate highly with autism, psychosis, etc. Also, extreme privilege and fame, especially at a young age, is very often a cause of functional insanity. I suspect that this includes the privilege of growing up with modern 'magical and opaque' technologies.
Please unpack this term. My kids have a Wii; should I be scared?
Scared? Definitely not. However, I think its almost certainly the case that if they could be as motivated to play a musical instrument or paint as they probably are to play the Wii, or at least half as motivated to dos so, that would be a good thing to encourage.
Please explain. I wonder if I'm missing something important by not playing chess.
Wei_Dai writes "I wonder if I'm missing something important by not playing chess."
I am a somewhat decent chess player[*] and a reasonable Go player (3 dan, barely, at last rated tournament a few years ago). If you're inclined to thinking about cognition itself, and about questions like the value of heuristics and approximations that only work sometimes, such games are great sources of examples. In some cases, the strong players have already thinking along those lines for more than a century, though using a different vocabulary. E.g., Go concepts like aji and thickness seem strongly related to Less Wrong discussions of the relative value of conjunctive and disjunctive plans.
There might also be some rationalist value in learning at the gut level that we're not on the primordial savannah any more by putting a thousand or so hours or more into at least one discipline where you can be utterly unmistakably crushed by someone who scores a zero on the usual societal/hindbrain tags for seriousness (like a bored 9 year old Ukrainian who obliterates you in the first round of the tournament on the way to finishing the tournament undefeated with a rating provisionally revised to 5 dan:-).
That said, I think you will probably get much more bang for your rationalist-wins-the-world buck from studying other things. In particular, I'd nominate (1) math along the usual engineering-ish main sequence (calculus, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, statistics) and (2) computer programming. History and microeconomics-writ-large are also strong candidates. So it's not particularly worth studying chess or go beyond the point where you just find it fun for its own sake.
[*] highwater mark approximately 60 seconds before I abandoned my experiment with playing chess somewhat seriously: forced threefold repetition against a 2050ish-rated player who happened to be tournament director of the local chess club minitournament, who had told me earlier that I could stop recording when my clock fell below 5 minutes, and who ruled upon my 3-fold repetition that it didn't count as a draw because the game was not being recorded
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there's only James Simmons). There's also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalous number of theists in those fields relative to other high-IQ fields) but the people who are recognized as the best in those fields are probably matched only by the best physicists (as a group) in epistemic rationality. Certainly those fields reward epistemic rationality like no others.
Poker, MtG, Go, etc have good instrumental track records compared to math but bad ones compared to chess IMHO.
BTW, I feel instrumental rationality guilt at writing a blog comment that few people are likely to read. I'd love it if someone were to incorporate this and their thoughts about it into a top level post.
Am I missing something? Is Tyler Cowen famous for something other than being a moderately high-status academic economist with a blog? Otherwise, why are you more impressed with him than with leading academic mathematicians, such as Terence Tao?
Tyler has a regular New York Times column and is part of society in a way that no mathematician I know of is. He can influence influential people in a way that Terry can't. He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values. Terry does what lots of other people do, he just does a hundred times more of it moderately better than they would.
Once again, apparent disagreement on this point seems to me to be an instance of academics and those with academic aspirations simply not seeing status other than academic status. Not doing so is part of their training of course, but it leads to a very confused picture of the world.
That is every bit as true of Terry as Tyler, and probably more so: Tyler would probably like to be Larry Summers, Milton Friedman, or Paul Krugman, while Terry Tao is pretty much exactly who Terry Tao wants to be.
My interpretation of the disagreement is different: an unwarranted assumption on the part of some that those with academic high status would really prefer something else, but are willing to "settle" for academia; as opposed to academia simply being the best place society currently offers for their values to be pursued. (And yes, academia is "part of society".) I would argue that any picture of the world on which "instrumental rationality" is synonymous with "financial/political success" is more confused than mine.
As for influence, see the USQ affair. Terry Tao can influence when he wants. I'm sure he could get a NY Times column (or certainly a LA Times column) if he wanted one.
I just doubt that you are correct, about the Times column or anything else above.
Academia, and especially math, seems to me to exist to not be part of society, to be literally descended from monastic orders, etc. It indoctrinates people to claim what you are saying, and even believe it, but people's values are pretty objective and not so measurable by such claims.
How impactful was his involvement in the USQ affair?
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he's smarter and can access more fun, but I think it's VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he'd go back to his life.
Financial/political success isn't 'instrumental rationality'. Maslow's 'self-actualization' is. Tyler and Terry both do pretty well in that respect, but in my assessment, not comparably well.
Even if that was true (and I think komponisto is more likely to be correct here), I'm not sure it would support your conclusion, since Terry might also not want to go back to his life after being wireheaded for a year but that doesn't mean not wanting to be wireheaded is a miscalculation.
Overall I'm surprised that you are so confident about what goals/values other people would have if they didn't miscalculate, when I'm not even sure what goals/values I should have. If you think you have some real insights that others are missing, you probably need to give a systematic explanation to bridge the inferential gaps, instead of arguing via these comments.
Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
Think about what this entails: you're essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true -- that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today's Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that's exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were "outside of society", but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
MichaelVassar:
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I'd say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you're not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you're also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you've probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I don't have enough data to compare such gaming outcomes very well, but I'll pass on something that I thought was funny and perhaps containing enough truth to be thought-provoking (from Aaron Brown's The Poker Face of Wall Street): "National bridge champion and hedge fund manager Josh Parker explained the nuances of serious high school games players to me. The chess player did well in school, had no friends, got 800s on his SATs, and did well at a top college. The poker and backgammon set (one crowd in the 1970s) did badly in school, had tons of friends, aced their SATs, and were stars at good colleges. The bridge players flunked out of high school, had no friends, aced their SATs, and went on to drop out of top colleges. In the 1980s, we all ended up trading options together."
Also, FWIW, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are apparently in the bridge camp, though I dunno whether they played in high school.
Who do the chess and bridge players play bridge and chess with if they don't have friends?
I've never become friends with any of the dozens of people with whom I've played chess in person (see below for why the qualifier "in person" is relevant) excepting one high-school classmate. A chess player is pretty much forced to suppress any natural human cooperative instincts like reciprocal altruism, instincts that are probably very important in the establishment of friendships. Also, sharing small pleasures seems important in starting friendships, and in chess the pleasure of one party coincides with pain in the other party.
Also, since the early 1990s anyone logging on to the Free Internet Chess Server can with an expected wait of less than a minute be matched up with another chess player of whatever skill level (more precisely, Elo rating, which is calculated automatically by the server) one desires. There is no need to remember the identity of who one has previously played against (although doing so will tend to increase one's rating a little since individual players have styles that can be learned and exploited in the game).
Of course there could well be some exaggeration for dramatic effect there --- as David Friedman likes to say, one should be skeptical of any account which might survive on its literary or entertainment value alone. But it's not any sort of logical impossibility. In Dallas near UTD (which had a strong well-funded chess team which contributed some of the strong coffeehouse players) ca. 2002 I was able to play dozens of coffeehouse games against strangers and casual acquaintances. One can also play in tournaments and in open-to-all clubs. Perhaps one could even play grudge matches against people one dislikes. Also today one can play an enormous number of strangers online, and even in the 1970s people played postal chess.
I didn't mention bridge because I think of it as a game people take up later in life and transfer skills to, not as a game people learn as kids and transfer skills from. I could easily be wrong about this.
Other members of the chess and bridge clubs.
I don't suppose you've considered having a blog? It would increase the odds of what you write getting seen.
Would the love of pure math for its purity count as part of the anti-epistemic epistomology?
More generally, the subject of anti-epistomology (ideas so bad that they're crippling) seems worth exploring, especially if it's grounded in knowledge about the ways people actually think rather than guessing about the mistakes that people one disagrees with must be making. (Not a swipe at you-- I'm thinking more about the way atheists seem to overestimate how irrational religious people are.)
I don't know if I've got enough for a top level post there, but I'll seriously consider it. Meanwhile, if anyone else has ideas about anti-epistolomology, please write about it.
He wrote a book specifically about transference of chess training to instrumental rationality
http://amzn.to/eYiTaS
I found it quite good, and parts of it sound much like Waitzkin. He talks a lot about psychology, self-control and management of (one's own) computational resources, all of which should be quite useful for instrumental rationality.
I think there's probably more to learn by playing poker... it seems that most advanced rationalists still fail at poker and are aware enough to attribute their losses to irrational failings of emotion. Being aware of why you fail at poker seems to be a valuable life lesson. And of course, learning that you do not fail at poker is an even more valuable lesson.
I'm honestly a little surprised that poker hasn't gotten more attention here. Half the game is managing emotional bias and modeling others' internal state, and the other half is pure statistics. It's like a beautiful little microcosm of applied rationality.
FWIW, the LW NYC group holds regular game nights, and uses poker specifically as a rationality training ground. If you make the correct EV decisions, the pure statistics really will get you a long way. The rest, well...
How much attention should it get? http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=poker%20site%3Alesswrong.com
We discuss an awful lot of topics here so it makes sense that anyone's pet topic has only been minimally discussed.
Oh, I'm not calling for it to be covered; its absence doesn't leave a gap in our knowledge, except insofar as our knowledge applies to poker night. But it's surprising to me that Kevin's post was the first time I'd seen it used, given how widely known the rules are and how attractive it is as an example.
Chess teaches you to carefully consider the consequences of your available actions and choose the action with the best consequences. Becoming a grand master involves increasing your ability to do this in the domain of chess when you should be generalizing the skill to other applications.
I expect that you in particular managed to learn this skill from other sources.
Maybe, or perhaps Michael meant the importance of cultivating a competitive spirit, or a habit of studying and practicing, or something else?
He got it right, though The Art of Learning is VERY interesting on those topics.