hyporational comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MrMind 27 October 2014 08:58AM

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Comment author: mare-of-night 29 October 2014 05:56:37PM 5 points [-]

There have been discussions here in the past about whether "extreme", lesswrong-style rationality is actually useful, and why we don't have many extremely successful people as members of the community.

I've noticed that Ramit Sethi often uses concepts we talk about here, but under different names. I'm not sure if he's as high a level as we're looking for as evidence, but he appears to be extremely successful as a businessman. I think he started out in life/career coaching, and then switched to selling online courses when he got popular. His stuff is generally around the theme of "how to win at life", but focused on his own definition of that, which is mainly having a profitable and interesting career. (He has a lot of free content which is only inconvenience-walled by being part of a mailing list - this video is one of those things.)

I'm curious if anyone else here knows of him, and what you think of him.

Comment author: hyporational 30 October 2014 06:01:47AM *  2 points [-]

why we don't have many extremely successful people as members of the community.

I'm not sure if the community has been around long enough for this to be a useful kind of a measurement. Success doesn't happen in an instant and there's a lot of turnover. People who are already successful don't have much pressure to join in.

Comment author: RowanE 30 October 2014 01:46:56PM 2 points [-]

Additionally, "extreme success" is usually defined in zero sum terms that make it definitionally extremely rare, in addition to the strong influence of chance in whether one achieves success in most fields. So a community as small as ours with "not many extremely successful people" may still be completely worthwhile and have a high rate of extreme success per capita compared to most groups.