CronoDAS comments on The Costs of Rationality - Less Wrong

32 Post author: RobinHanson 03 March 2009 06:13PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 March 2009 07:29:13PM *  10 points [-]

My definition differs from the one in Wikipedia because I require that your goals not call for any particular ritual of cognition. When you care more about winning then about any particular way of thinking - and "winning" is not defined in such a way as to require in advance any particular method of thinking - then you are pursuing rationality.

This, in turn, ends up implying epistemic rationality: if the definition of "winning" doesn't require believing false things, then you can generally expect to do better (on average) by believing true things than false things - certainly in real life, despite various elaborate philosophical thought experiments designed from omniscient truth-believing third-person standpoints.

Conversely you can start with the definition of rational belief as accuracy-seeking, and get to pragmatics via "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" and the notion of rational policies as those which you would retain even given an epistemically rational prediction of their consequences.

Comment author: CronoDAS 04 March 2009 01:53:41AM 3 points [-]

Regarding "rationalists should win" - that still leaves us with the problem of distinguishing between someone who won because he was rational and someone who was irrational but won because of sheer dumb luck.

For example, buying lottery tickets is (almost always) a negative EV proposition - but some people do win the lottery. Was it irrational for lottery winners to have bought those specific tickets, which did indeed win?

Given a sufficiently large sample, the most spectacular successes are going to be those who pursued opportunities with the highest possible payoff regardless of the potential downside or even the expected value... for every spectacular success, there are probably several times as many spectacular failures.

Comment author: timtyler 04 March 2009 03:10:09PM 0 points [-]

Re: Regarding "rationalists should win" - that still leaves us with the problem of distinguishing between someone who won because he was rational and someone who was irrational but won because of sheer dumb luck.

Just don't go there in the first place. Attempting to increase your utility is enough.