steven0461 comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong

30 Post author: matt 18 May 2009 10:57PM

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Comment author: steven0461 19 May 2009 05:48:56PM *  4 points [-]
  • bad luck
  • if it's impossible to win (in that case, just lose less; a semantic difference)
  • if "winning" is defined as something else than achieving what you truly value

That's all of them, I think.

ETA: more in the context of this post, a good reason to lose at some subgoal is if winning at the subgoal can be done only at the cost of losing too much elsewhere.

Comment author: billswift 20 May 2009 12:47:23AM 1 point [-]

Another is failure of knowledge. It's possible simply not to know something you need to succeed, at the time you need it. No one can know everything they might possibly need to. It is not irrational, if you did not know that you would need to know beforehand.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 19 May 2009 05:58:10PM *  -1 points [-]

I exclude bad luck from this list, since winning might as well be defined over counterfactual worlds. If you lose in your real world, you can still figure out how well you'd do in the counterfactuals.