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Ben_LandauTaylor comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
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The example in the thread is real-life-ish - compare to the story of Voltaire and friends winning the French lottery. But if you want more:
It's easy to think of trivial examples of one-time victories - for example, an early Bitcoin investor realizing that crypto-currency had potential and buying some when it was still worth fractions of a cent. But you can justly accuse me of cherry-picking here and demand repeatable examples.
Nothing guarantees that there will be repeatable examples - it could be that people are bad at taking ideas seriously until the ideas succeed once, at which point they realize they were wrong and jump on the bandwagon.
But in fact I think there are such examples. One such is investing in index funds rather than mutual funds/picking your own stocks. There are strong reasons to believe you'll do better, most people know those reasons but don't credit them, and some people do credit them and end up with more money.
Occasional use of modafinil might fall in this category as well, depending on whether we define people's usual reasons for not taking it as irrational or rational-given-different-utility-functions.
I don't think most of these examples will end out as "such obvious wins no one could possibly disagree with them" - with the possible exception of index funds it's never as purely mathematical as the lottery example - but I think for most people the calculus is clear.
Thank you for the response.
I'd like to hear this from a financial expert. Do we have any who'd like to speak on this?
Oh? What will modafinil do for me? (Will google and return to this thread, but if someone wants to recommend some links with concentrated useful info, it would be appreciated.)
I also have some objections to this sort of "obvious win" that do not depend on what modafinil's specific effects are: namely, that "deciding to start taking a drug without the advice and supervision of a licensed medical professional is bad" seems to be a decent heuristic to live by. It's not unalterable, but it seems good to a first approximation. Do you disagree?
Forgive me for my ignorance: so this guy has lots of Bitcoin now? What can you buy with Bitcoin? Can you just convert the Bitcoin into dollars? If so, how much money did this person make from this?
My suspicion is that these examples are actually more like "it's not clear whether these things are, in fact, even wins for the people who did them, never mind whether they will be wins for other people who are considering doing them". I was really looking for something more unambiguous than that.
I will comment more when I've investigated / received clarifications on the examples you've provided. In the meantime I would love to see more examples.
There's lots of modafinil info at gwern's page. Wikipedia is also a pretty good source. The short (and only slightly inaccurate) version is that it gives you the good effects of caffeine, but stronger, and with no withdrawal or other drawbacks. It's had positive effects on my mood and focus.
Reasonable! Which is why I'm taking modafinil with the advice and supervision of a licensed medical professional. If you're wary of self-medication, you might want to look into that route.
Thank you for the link, I will look into that.
If you are so inclined, I would be interested in hearing how you approached the "advice of a medical professional" aspect; did you go to your GP and say "So I'm considering taking modafinil"? (If you'd prefer not to answer, I entirely understand, no need to even respond to say no; thank you in any case for your comment.)
I'd been seeing a psychiatrist to get treated for anhedonia. We tried a few different SSRIs, which didn't help. Then I read about modafinil, and it seemed like it could plausibly help treat some of my symptoms (although not their causes), so I brought it up. He agreed it was a reasonable thing to try and prescribed it. I've been taking modafinil regularly for a year, now. It's not a giant boost for me, but it is a boost, and the drawbacks are negligible.
That's pretty remarkable, I would expect that most psychiatrists would be highly resistant to such a proposal. Also, having to try SSRIs first in order to maybe get them to agree is not an insignificant cost.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like Ben_LandauTaylor's strategy of modafinil acquisition is viable for me.
No kidding!
How much data is there behind this conclusion. Is it comparable to the centuries of experience we have with caffeine?
Why are you asking, instead of looking?