You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

EE43026F comments on Irrational hardware vs. rational software - Less Wrong Discussion

-10 Post author: tygorton 22 May 2012 06:52AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (41)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: EE43026F 23 May 2012 12:10:33AM *  0 points [-]

and is not regularly the guiding principle of not hugely successful people?

Why the dichotomy? A principle can be used by different people with different abilities, leading to different levels of success, but still remain fundamentally flawed, leading to suboptimal achievement for both gifted and non-gifted people.

Short term benefits vs long term benefits..

Comment author: shokwave 23 May 2012 03:49:00AM 0 points [-]

Why the dichotomy?

If a test regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I have cancer, and regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I don't have cancer, it's not a good test.

Similarly, if a principles guides people to be successful, and it guides people to be unsuccessful, it is not a good principle.

For example: it could be said that "eat food at least daily, drink water at least daily, and sleep daily or close to it" is a principle that hugely successful people follow. It is also a principle that not hugely successful people follow. Following this principle will not make me hugely successful.

I could just say "Pr(not successful | follows principle) needs to be low, otherwise base rate makes it meaningless".