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eli_sennesh comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong
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"Caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his group ISIS have been behaving exactly like this. They are quite young, but don't appear quite able to take on a Western military yet.
And yet, by definition, a group who are better at rationality win more often. We ought to expect that rational civilizations can beat irrational ones, because rationality is systematized cross-domain winning.
Well, there is this "valley of bad rationality" where being more rational about part of the problem but not yet more rational about other part can make people less winning.
Sometimes I feel are we are there at a society level. We have smart individuals, we have science, we fly to the moon, etc. However, superstition and blind hate can be an efficient tool for coordinating a group to fight against another group. We don't use this tool much (because it doesn't fit well with rationality and science), but we don't have an equally strong replacement. Also, only a few people in our civilization do the rationality and science. So even if there is a rationality-based defense, most of our society is too stupid to use it efficiently. On the scale from "barbarians" to "bayesians", most of our society is somewhere in the middle: not barbaric enough, but still far from rational.
A group that is better at rationality will win more often, but winning more often is not the same thing as "winning in a superset of the situations in which the irrational win".