Stingray comments on Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: MrMind 14 March 2016 08:02AM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 14 March 2016 10:43:07AM *  8 points [-]

Simple hypothesis relating to Why Don't Rationalists Win:

Everyone has some collection of skills and abilities, including things like charisma, luck, rationality, determination, networking ability, etc. Each person's success is limited by constraints related to these abilities, in the same way that an application's performance is limited by the CPU speed, RAM, disk speed, networking speed, etc of the machine(s) it runs on. But just as for many applications the performance bottleneck isn't CPU speed, for most people the success bottleneck isn't rationality.

Comment author: cousin_it 14 March 2016 03:37:03PM *  12 points [-]

It could be worse. Rationality essays could be attracting a self-selected group of people whose bottleneck isn't rationality. Actually I think that's true. Here's a three-step program that might help a "stereotypical LWer" more than reading LW:

1) Gym every day

2) Drink more alcohol

3) Watch more football

Only slightly tongue in cheek ;-)

Comment author: Stingray 15 March 2016 10:25:54AM *  4 points [-]

Strongly disagree with 2) and 3). I think you mean them as a proxy for 'become more social, make more connections, find ways to fit in a local culture', but quality of connections usually matters more than quantity. But in many circles that are likely to matter for a typical LWer 3) is likely to be useless and likely benefits of 2) are achievable without drinking or with a very modest drinking.

Comment author: cousin_it 15 March 2016 01:54:25PM *  4 points [-]

My advice was more like "get in touch with your stupid animal side". The social part comes later :-)

Comment author: Lumifer 15 March 2016 02:20:44PM -2 points [-]

I don't know about yours, but my stupid animal side is uninterested in alcohol and football. It wants to eat, sleep, fuck, and harass betas :-D

Comment author: Stingray 15 March 2016 02:43:47PM *  -1 points [-]

Then living in a wilderness and cutting trees would be much better. Or some kinds of manual work where you can see the fruits of your labor, e.g. gardening. I believe that activities like these would be better suited for connecting mental and physical parts of a person.