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Calvin comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong
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We might find out by trying to apply them to the real world and seeing that they don't work.
Well, it is less common now, but I think a slow retreat of the community from the position that instrumental rationality is applied science of winning at life is one of the cases when the beliefs had to be corrected to better match evidence.
Is it? I mean, I'd happily say that the LW crowd as a whole does not seem particularly good at winning at life, but that is and should be our goal.
Speaking broadly, the desire to lead happy / successful / interesting life (however winning is defined) it is a laudable goal shared by wast majority of humans. The problem was that some people took the idea further and decided that winning is a good qualification measure as to weather someone is a good rationalist or not, as debunked by Luke here. There are better examples, but I can't find them now.
Also, my two cents are that while rational agent may have some advantage over irrational one in a perfect universe, real world is so fuzzy and full of noisy information that if superior reasoning decision making skill really improves your life, improvements are likely to be not as impressive as advertised by hopeful proponents of systematized winning theory.
I think that post is wrong as a description of the LW crowd's goals. That post talks as if one's akrasia were a fixed fact that had nothing to do with rationality, but in fact a lot of the site is about reducing or avoiding it. Likewise intelligence; that post seems to assume that your intelligence is fixed and independent of your rationality, but in reality this site is very interested in methods of increasing intelligence. I don't think anyone on this site is just interested in making consistent choices.