What comes before rationality

12 [deleted] 18 March 2011 03:22AM

Note: I am deleting this post because it contained personal information about a friend whose permission I did not expressly obtain.

Comments (92)

Comment author: erratio 18 March 2011 04:42:43AM 10 points [-]

Anecdotally, most people reading the Sequences will be neither harmed nor helped in the short term, for the same reason that your friend can clinically list off her problems (and probably their most successful interventions) without feeling able to change her reactions - there's a huge leap from absorbing knowledge to working out how to apply it. In the longer term, being exposed to a large volume of persuasive writing about how to own your beliefs and attitudes is helpful (in that it will help people make the shift away from a fixed mindset, which is absolutely essential for real progress), but I have no idea how much.

Personally, I do feel like I've gained benefit from my time here, but I'd be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one's beliefs.

Comment author: rysade 18 March 2011 10:35:08AM *  2 points [-]

I'd be hard-pressed to point to any specific article or technique that caused the change, other than the general atmosphere of challenging one's beliefs.

This is the story of the last year of my life. Most of the major paradigm shifts in my life I can attribute to either my own ingenuity or schooling, but this site (in a very short time span) has resulted in two shifts by itself.

Comment author: atucker 21 March 2011 03:59:19AM *  1 point [-]

(in that it will help people make the shift away from a fixed mindset, which is absolutely essential for real progress)

I agree that this is really important.

Many of the more useful recent changes in my life were the result of the idea that I can look at what's going wrong, and actually do something to try and change it (and see if that works, and keep trying and refining) more than any particular single piece of advice.

There was also some impact from different thinking habits (dissolving the question, avoiding generalizing from one example, thinking of goals and then solutions, etc.) which have definitely been widely helpful in my life, but rather than delivering a few large chunks of utility, they gave a bunch of really small ones.

Comment author: Kevin 18 March 2011 12:06:26PM *  7 points [-]

Professional MDMA psychotherapy seems to work really well for these kinds of things, though it is quite hard to come by in legal form. Just taking MDMA and then having an intimate/therapeutic conversation with a close friend might work just as well.

Really. MDMA is way more effective than anything else for this kind of thing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100719082927.htm http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/

(Should be about 10 years before MDMA makes it through the FDA approval process)

A much less effective recommendation is compassion/lovingkindness meditation.

Comment author: Marius 18 March 2011 08:34:48PM 6 points [-]

The study cited does not show that MDMA is the most effective therapy. It shows that MDMA can be useful in patients for whom conventional therapy has failed. There is a difference.

Comment author: Kevin 18 March 2011 10:30:25PM 1 point [-]

(Also meant to link to this but apparently that didn't happen. http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/ )

Yes, that's true. I'm intuitively inferring from the data and personal experience.

Comment author: SilasBarta 18 March 2011 08:26:17PM 2 points [-]

What makes you think the FDA would approve MDMA at all (if that's what you meant)?

Comment author: Kevin 18 March 2011 10:28:03PM 1 point [-]

Statement by the leadership of MAPS at their recent conference that they were solidly on track with regards to the FDA approval process. They are doing it by the book, are getting results showing high safety/efficacy, and the FDA is probably not going to be able to defy the data and keep MDMA illegal.

Comment author: Marius 19 March 2011 10:37:21PM 3 points [-]

MDMA may well turn out to be highly safe and effective, but MAPS is excessively optimistic in this assessment. See, for instance, their characterization of Dr. Halpern's response to the NHS critique as a "careful and well-reasoned response". In many of the instances, Halpern invents defenses to legitimate criticism. For instance:

*They reported his study was underpowered. His response should have been a power calculation demonstrating adequate study power; instead he simply noted that his was the largest study yet performed.

*NHS noted a lack of followup over time to investigate cognitive decline, and he claimed that the includion of only long-term users solved this problem. It does not, because he looked at current ravers only. Had he looked at "people who raved 5 years ago, regardless of current multidrug use, current death or disability, etc" this would be acceptable.

*Asking participants to refrain from taking ecstasy is nonstandard in a medical study. I understand that he did it to distinguish between acute and chronic effects, but it's not nearly as easy as that.

*Exclusion of polysubstance users is totally unacceptable in a study of drug safety. If MDMA and cocaine used together lead to more cognitive decline than cocaine alone, then that must be counted as "MDMA causes cognitive decline".

In order to obtain FDA approval despite multiple small studies showing a poor safety profile, a much larger and better-designed safety study will be required. Even then, the FDA has a history of rejecting medications that really ought to be approved. See Sugammadex.

Comment author: Swimmer963 22 March 2011 07:26:52AM 5 points [-]

I deleted this post. I will write another post later about why I deleted it.

Comment author: rabidchicken 22 March 2011 06:08:09PM 2 points [-]

Though the privacy concern was valid, the post was really interesting and made me think more carefully about possible negative impacts of rationality.

If you ever feel you can write something similar that avoids the concerns people had, that would be great.

Comment author: Swimmer963 22 March 2011 08:17:30PM 1 point [-]

I am planning to rewrite it minus privacy concerns, but it will require more research so I can't do it until the school year is over.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 December 2012 01:51:32AM 2 points [-]

I'm basically only curious because of the interesting title (found it while I was searching for a different LW post), but did you ever rewrite this?

Comment author: Swimmer963 31 December 2012 01:13:08PM 2 points [-]

Nope. Forgot it existed. Whoops.

Comment author: AstroCJ 22 March 2011 03:04:54PM 2 points [-]

I hope you didn't take my initial comment as being aggressive or judgemental; it was a good post, well written and interesting. I hope, too, that there's no kind of fallout.

Comment author: Swimmer963 22 March 2011 05:24:59PM 5 points [-]

I don't remember what your original comment was. However, when I read the gist of all the privacy comments, I realized I really had not thought about that aspect. Aggressive has nothing to do with it.

Comment author: AstroCJ 18 March 2011 05:33:19PM *  11 points [-]

I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you're [rot13'd description of Swimmer963 deleted].

I didn't whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend" who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.

On whether or not this will be important or not: [blanked].

EDIT: Deleted precis of Swimmer963's situation; it had served its purpose. EDIT: Deleted some personal information.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 19 March 2011 01:35:25AM 2 points [-]

This is an interesting point. However, given that people seldom have interest in random strangers, this really doesn't seem that worrisome.

If I were particularly dedicated to finding out, say, the name of the roommate of someone I don't know on the internet's roommate, this'd give me a decentish pointer. It'd still be really hard.

If I actually met the subject of this person and wanted to find out personal details about her life, I'd need to know specifically about this post and the author's relation to the subject. Otherwise, it seems quite hopeless.

At the very least though, she could have been more vague on their relationship, as it would have minimized any such risk and cost the post nothing.

Comment author: saturn 19 March 2011 09:46:00PM 4 points [-]

If Swimmer963 and her roommate have overlapping social circles, and Swimmer963 talks about posting on LW with her real life acquaintances, it's fairly likely that someone will be able to put two and two together.

Comment author: Swimmer963 22 March 2011 05:10:57AM 2 points [-]

We don't have the same circles, and we're no longer roommates, and I don't talk about Less Wrong with most people, and if any of you did meet her you might find out about it from her first...

Nevertheless, I did not think through all of that. I have some problems with privacy, i.e. I don't actually notice situations that involve 'personal' information, whether it's mine or other people's. At least I have the right to post whatever personal stuff I want wherever I want...but I don't have that right for other people.

I did change the wording of the original post to 'friend'.

Comment author: komponisto 18 March 2011 05:45:08PM *  2 points [-]

if you're going to share incredibly personal details about "a friend"... we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent.

I think (or, anyway, hope) what you meant to write was "you need her consent before posting", rather than "we need to know whether you obtained her consent [so that we can socially penalize you if it turns out you didn't]."

Comment author: AstroCJ 18 March 2011 10:09:35PM 1 point [-]

Socially penalise, nothing. Something as personal as this, it's deeply unusual not to make it clear that you have permission; my concern is for the privacy of person under discussion.

Comment author: nick012000 20 March 2011 10:46:42AM 0 points [-]

Why worry about Google stockpiling your personal information when people are entirely capable of profiling you anyway!

Comment author: handoflixue 21 March 2011 08:58:54PM 3 points [-]

Honestly, I've found the single hardest part of overcoming my damage is simply finding something that actually motivates me: For the majority of my life, even now, irrationality is sufficiently successful that I have no reason to "correct" it. I happen to have a strong investment in the identity of "rational", which gave me enough of a push to start reading this site, but I could still easily make excuses as to why I wasn't applying it. It wasn't until I found Something To Protect in my life that I started really taking this stuff seriously and began making an effort to "win" instead of merely being "right".

Once I had that motivation, I found this site to be incredibly helpful: a number of LW posts have explicitly helped me bridge gaps between "a strong analytical mind" and "a very damaged map of reality". There's still a LOT I'm working on, and I've been reading here for at least half a year, so it's hardly an instant fix. It requires a lot of effort - and that's why a good motivation is essential. I've found some posts instantly shift a huge chunk of my map in to a better alignment, and other posts suddenly pop up 3 months later and make me realize I've been doing things wrong my entire life.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 21 March 2011 07:12:56PM 3 points [-]

"I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality ... to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have..."

I have. Extremely much so. Although I REALLY don't want to discus my problems publicly like this, I can't find any other way to communicate the necessary information: I used to be extremely irrational with a large number of mental-illness-calibre delusions, and now I am, despite the occasionall bizarre failure mode and despite still being mentally ill in non epistemological ways, I'm catching up with LW in terms of sanity.

Comment author: pjeby 18 March 2011 08:31:16PM 3 points [-]

I'm not clear on the goal of your post -- it doesn't seem to make a statement or ask a specific question, either -- but if you are asking for practical advice for your friend, I would highly recommend the book "Recovering From Co-Dependency: It's Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood," by Weiss and Weiss. I've personally found it to be an invaluable resource, and IME it's just the thing for an analytical person interested in psychology to get an initial grip on actually doing something about their issues.

The book is written primarily as a bridge between theory and practice for therapists doing individual and group therapy for those issues; for a practical follow-up, I would suggest the two books by Pamela Levin that are cited by Weiss & Weiss: Becoming Who We Are, and Cycles of Power. Both of these latter books have things that one can do as an individual, without a therapist, but I personally found them more understandable and useful after seeing the larger framework in the first book I mentioned.

If you would personally like to help your friend, I would suggest reading the books yourself, but not necessarily before she does. One downside to studying these books at length, is that it may become incredibly obvious when interacting with people what developmental defects are likely the cause of their present problems... but much more obvious to you than to them. ;-)

Comment author: taryneast 20 March 2011 07:25:02PM *  1 point [-]

For anybody having difficulty finding that on amazon, it's actually:

Recovery from Co-Dependency: It's Never Too Late to Reclaim Your Childhood

and

Becoming the Way We Are

(took me a little bit of fiddling to find).

The two Pamela Levin books seem to be out of print now, but the co-dependancy one is available.

BTW - looks interesting, thanks :)

Comment author: pjeby 20 March 2011 08:26:11PM *  1 point [-]

The two Pamela Levin books seem to be out of print now, but the co-dependancy one is available.

I got my (used) copies via Amazon:

Cycles of Power

Becoming The Way We Are

(took me a little bit of fiddling to find).

Sorry about that; the subtitle on the back cover of Weiss&Weiss actually reads "it's never too late to have a happy childhood", even though the front is different.

Comment author: taryneast 20 March 2011 11:19:42PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the new links :)

Also - strangely, the word amazon had a real problem with was "recovering" instead of "recovery".... I think I've grown too dependent on google's smart search-words! ;)

Comment author: magfrump 18 March 2011 03:41:00PM 3 points [-]

I have personally had some significant issues getting myself to deal with problems in a constructive way--I was diagnosed with depression several months ago.

I put off seeking treatment, and especially medication, for essentially irrational reasons.

More recently I have started taking Lexapro, and I am MUCH happier. A large part of being able to make that decision came from Less Wrong--the ideas of "happiness set points," beating procrastination, and the idea that using technology to help improve myself is natural and necessary, helped me close the gap between not doing anything and doing something effective.

There are plenty of stories going around about people using decision theory to lose weight.

I would say there are several examples of people who have used the methods of rationality (or at least have used Less Wrong) to help with uncommon problems.

Unless your friend is intensely theist or overly sensitive to contrarianism I can't think of what downside there is to this experiment.

Comment author: Swimmer963 18 March 2011 03:53:24PM 1 point [-]

She is definitely not theist, so that isn't a problem.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 18 March 2011 02:13:09PM 3 points [-]

In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I'm doing.

Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there's nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.

Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don't really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default assumptions, which are then reinforced by their association with my representations of stuff that's really there.

Put differently: I seem to be equipped with a buggy inference engine that, at least by default, infers the presence of X in the absence of compelling new evidence, based on my prior probability for X, and then turns around and uses the (inferred) presence of X as though it were new evidence, raising the posterior probability of X.

It's a self-reinforcing loop: I end up seeing what I want to see. (Or what I fear seeing, or what I am otherwise predisposed to see.)

Whereas when I do pay attention, my brain isn't quite so prone to "fill in the gaps" with X, or at least not so prone to confuse inferred X with perceived X, and my estimate of the probability of X in any given situation is therefore not artificially sustained. (And for the obviously wrong Xes, that's often sufficient -- once I eliminate the artificial support, natural inconsistencies will take care of the rest.)

Not sure how much use this community is for that, though.

I would encourage your friend to experiment with a meditation practice that works for her... just some way of establishing the habit of being present with what is actually happening right now and paying attention to it.

Different things work for different people in this space -- a good friend of mine has a practice of putting everything he touches back exactly where he found it, for example, which he does not think of as a meditative practice but seems to me to achieve the same goal.

It's a slow process, though.

Comment author: handoflixue 22 March 2011 07:48:16PM 3 points [-]

I've found that sort of self-awareness is incredibly helpful. My newest trick has been asking WHY I'm violating my previous plans - for instance, if I plan to diet, and end up over-eating, I'll ask myself, in the moment, why I'm doing this. It helps me form better plans in the future, as I can better predict my own future reasoning. For instance, I might over-eat because I got lost in work for eight hours and then realized I was utterly ravenous, or I might realize that I enjoy the pleasure of food more than I enjoy the idea of losing weight and drop the idea entirely :)

Comment author: waveman 18 March 2011 05:21:09AM 10 points [-]

If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.

It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller's book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically "gifted" out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.

Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.

What to do?

Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones - see for example "The Gift of Therapy" for how it can work.

Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.

One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up in bad relationships is that they feel compelled to replay the experiences until they solve them.

Successful therapy seems to involve replaying the experiences and reprogramming the emotional mind with new ways of processing the experience.

The problem is that often the person cannot actually go back to the original experiences in their full intensity because they were too traumatic. If the person can go back and reprocess the original experiences emotionally, they are likely to have a moment of realization and restructure their emotional reactions. The rational work follows this and is usually relatively simple.

EMDR is one technique that can help in this regard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing . The eye movement technique mutes the overwhelming intensity of the experience, allowing the adult brain to reprocess the traumatic events and deal with them with the full resources of the adult brain.

A technique is in some ways quite similar is Ed Seykota's Trading Tribe process. This was developed to help traders deal with the intense psychological challenges of trading, such as 60% drawdowns, and losing 10% of your net worth in 15 minutes. I personally have had a few major breakthroughs with this process. As with EMDR the focus is on providing a means for the person to fully experience the original traumatic events and reprocess them.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 19 March 2011 01:37:56AM 2 points [-]

I don’t know how the LessWrong community would treat people like my friend, or whether introducing her to the Sequences would help. It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.

I don't see much of a need for evidence before introducing someone to the sequences. I teach private test prep and will routinely refer my students to the sequences for reading practice. I sincerely believe it helps, but I'm highly confident I will never be able to obtain reliable evidence to that effect. I am quite confident, however, it does little or no harm.

So unless it'd be costly to get her to read the sequences, how could they hurt?

Comment author: MinibearRex 21 March 2011 04:21:59AM 2 points [-]

One obvious case would be this. If she has trouble trusting people already, learning a whole bunch of new problems about them might worsen it. On the other hand, she is a psych student, so I assume she already knows a lot of that stuff.

Comment author: rabidchicken 18 March 2011 04:08:20AM 2 points [-]

Reading the sequences inspired me to test my beliefs, including my negative beliefs about humans that mostly stem from my relationship with my parents. Sometimes I discovered that my pessimism did not go away or got worse, but on average it receded, since I was so far below the LW norm already.

I don't know how this would specifically apply to someone who has been sexually abused. But If humans really are better than her cached beliefs, applying the methods of rationality to them should make her happier. There is very little concrete evidence when it comes to predicting human minds, but rationality should always lead you to a more logical conclusion based off of your priors.

Comment author: byrnema 18 March 2011 03:43:11AM *  3 points [-]

Some of the even more drastic failures are described in the book The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz.

There's no way I'm reading that book. Knowing about and thinking about the bizarre ways people abuse children is the worst thing about reality for me. It's why I don't read online local news anymore -- the media thinks such stuff is fascinating but I guess they don't expect people to actually think about what the story is about? But still these sad little stories (sometimes only 8 words long) make their way into whatever I'm reading and ruin my day.

Does anyone else share my sensitivity? Does anyone have any advice?

Comment author: mutterc 20 March 2011 07:29:40PM 7 points [-]

My technique for keeping from being depressed by news: remember that, if it's newsworthy, it's rare.

"In sports, half the teams won their games today. All of the players are millionaires, most of whom have no major drug problems." - Dogbert

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 18 March 2011 04:42:05PM 4 points [-]

Does anyone else share my sensitivity? Does anyone have any advice?

I've suffered of the same. There were a couple of real reports about child abuse that I once read which not only completely ruined my mood, but would also threaten to ruin my mood if I ever remembered them afterwards. Since they were rather shocking ones, I still can't help occasionally recalling them, even though I read them maybe five years ago. This hasn't been helped by the fact that if I see a headline about a child abuse case so that the actual article is, say, only a mouse click away, I get this morbid curiosity and have to read it.

I was also rather strongly distraught on a couple of occasions when some online friends mentioned (non-abusively) spanking their kids, to the extent that I had to take a break from the conversation to calm down.

Over the years my tolerance has grown, but I'm not sure of what exactly it's been that did it. Partially it's been just adaptation - running into a shocking concept often enough that it's started to feel less serious. This isn't specific only to child abuse: I've always reacted strongly to any reports of people suffering. My getting more able to accept that it's happening has been a part of an overall process of getting more used to the idea of people suffering. It's involved stuff like shifting my emotional utility function away from states of the world and towards my own behavior. Also learning to recognize on an emotional level that the map isn't the territory - I'm allowed to not feel bad about horrible things happening as long as it doesn't make me ignore them, because horrible things won't stop happening just because I feel bad about them. Of course I've always known this on an intellectual level, but accepting this on an emotional level is much harder and something I still need to work on. Reading Ken Wilber's No Boundary and doing some of the exercises outlined there helped considerably.

Comment author: byrnema 23 March 2011 09:33:22PM *  1 point [-]

Reading Ken Wilber's No Boundary and doing some of the exercises outlined there helped considerably.

Thanks, I'll try reading through that book. A comparison of Eastern and Western perspectives would be interesting in any case.

It's involved stuff like shifting my emotional utility function away from states of the world and towards my own behavior.

I also found Michael Vassar's comment enlightening:

"Pain is not suffering. Pain is just an attention signal. Suffering is when one neural system tells you to pay attention, and another says it doesn't want the state of the world to be like this."

"Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding" by Kahlil Gibran was life-changing for me. I interpreted it as whenever I am saddened by something, it's a signal that I need to face a truth about it. It helped in many aspects of my life; for example, in helping me to realize (at a level of emotional acceptance) that I can't force people to be or feel the way I want them to. But it it didn't seem to help in other cases, such as this one, where even after I accepted the truth of the situation ('yes, I understand this happens and it's part reality'), the pain didn't go away.

I think Michael's comment may be the other half of it. I know that child abuse causes me pain, so I will prevent it as I can, but find a detachment to be liberated from being distressed about what is beyond my control. There is also a comfort in affirming that I would change it if I could, as would others -- my emotional utility function has shifted from the actual state of reality towards approving of and finding a protected place for these values I have that I find are important to me.

It is the Serenity Prayer, I guess, from a fresh direction -- as this meditation is also the kind of thing that has been revisited so many times it loses its meaning.

I'll think about fitting this second piece into my thoughts and see if it helps in a practical way with my problem.

Comment author: JGWeissman 18 March 2011 04:18:23AM 2 points [-]

Every boyfriend is narcissistic or has borderline personality disorder.

This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narcissistic/normal person is to exhibit a given behavior. Explicitly tracking the evidence for (and against!) narcissism may help your roommate see that her boyfriends, like everyone else, occasionally display narcissistic behavior, but that does not make them narcissists.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 March 2011 04:38:33AM 4 points [-]

That's possible, and it's also possible that she's getting involved with that sort of man, either because she's attracted to them or because they're attracted to her and she doesn't have the tools needed to turn them down.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 18 March 2011 08:01:08AM 1 point [-]

Both occurred to me. Your suggestion fits the conventional plot better. I have no direct experience myself, but I hear it in stories all the time.

Comment author: rysade 18 March 2011 10:09:17AM 0 points [-]

I would NOT suggest analyzing either statistical evidence or assuming that she is perhaps right about her exes. The odds are of course not with her when we ask if she has had multiple boyfriends with borderline or narcissism. What we are more likely to find is that she has the same issues many of us here on this site do, which is that she is partially mind-blind and is taking shots in the dark as we all would if we were too close to the situation

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 18 March 2011 07:59:48AM 1 point [-]

It’s not an experiment I want to try unless I have some concrete evidence that it will help.

Status quo bias.

I understand that you care about her, but there's no way recommending that she read about biases will harm her. It sounds like she already knows all that stuff, though, from how you describe her.

Comment author: lessdazed 18 March 2011 06:05:57AM -1 points [-]

Still. A lot of things are hard. A lot of things are hard but possible. So far, I have zero examples of people who have used the methods of rationality, as separate from just knowledge, to help with the problems they have that most people don’t have...

LW has helped me articulate my intuitions and given me more confidence in them. These intuitions are usually about why an argument is wrong.

It's about how not to be stupid, how not to fail in certain ways. I don't have examples of things it has helped me do because it is never a necessary or sufficient condition for success.

In the rough equation luckskillperseverance=success, I think rationality is added to luck, making it (luck+rationality)skillperseverance=success. With luck one could avoid all pitfalls otherwise avoidable with rationality.

Comment author: handoflixue 22 March 2011 08:22:37PM 1 point [-]

That's a very interesting insight, the idea that rationality and luck serve the same role, and can ostensibly be substituted for each other. I'm enjoying re-framing it as "learning rationality is learning to be lucky". Not sure if it's a useful insight, but definitely an interesting new perspective. Thank you :)