= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shokwave comments on Irrational hardware vs. rational software - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (41)
But is being an effective human all that "rational".
When I look at humans who are hugely successful, I do not see rationality as their guiding principal.
Do you see some other principle that is regularly the guiding principle of hugely successful people, and is not regularly the guiding principle of not hugely successful people?
(If you do, please share! I'd like to be hugely successful, so it would be rational for me to adopt that principle if it existed.)
The book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is sort of the go-to text here. The upshot is that the guiding principle is twofold: helping people and requesting help from people. If you wish to maximize your own wealth and power, apply this principle especially to the rich and powerful.
Why the dichotomy? A principle can be used by different people with different abilities, leading to different levels of success, but still remain fundamentally flawed, leading to suboptimal achievement for both gifted and non-gifted people.
Short term benefits vs long term benefits..
If a test regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I have cancer, and regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I don't have cancer, it's not a good test.
Similarly, if a principles guides people to be successful, and it guides people to be unsuccessful, it is not a good principle.
For example: it could be said that "eat food at least daily, drink water at least daily, and sleep daily or close to it" is a principle that hugely successful people follow. It is also a principle that not hugely successful people follow. Following this principle will not make me hugely successful.
I could just say "Pr(not successful | follows principle) needs to be low, otherwise base rate makes it meaningless".